The Man Who Survived Two Nuclear Bomb Attacks
Tsutomu Yamaguchi died from stomach cancer. The cancer part perhaps isn’t surprising given that Yamaguchi is currently the only person officially recognized by the Japanese government as having lived through the atomic bombings of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (Note: There were actually well over a 100 or so others as well, perhaps as many as 165; they just have never been officially recognized by the Japanese government to date.) What is surprising, given that history, is that Yamaguchi avoided the disease for so long, not dying until January 4, 2010, at the age of 93.
At the age of 29, Yamaguchi was on his way back home from a three month long business trip to Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. At the time, he was an engineer for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries- specifically, working as an oil tanker designer. On his way to the train station to head back to his home in Nagasaki, he noticed he’d forgotten his travel permit and went back to get it while his colleagues, Akira Iwanaga and Kuniyoshi Sato, went on.
He picked up his pass and was on his way back to the station when, at 8:15 a.m., he saw a bomber flying over the city and “two small parachutes”, then a rush of blinding light, sound, wind, and heat knocked him to the ground. Mr. Yamaguchi had the misfortune of being approximately 3 km from a nuclear blast. The immediate effects of this were his ear drums rupturing, temporarily blindness, and burns over much of his upper body.
After his initial disorientation, and in spite of his injuries, Tsutomu managed to make his way to an air-raid shelter where he met up with his two colleagues who had also survived the blast. He spent the night in the shelter and in the morning he and his co-workers headed back to Nagasaki via train as originally planned. When he arrived, he received bandage treatments from a local hospital, and even felt well enough to report for work on August the 9th, just 3 days later… (Now I feel like a bit of a pansy about taking a full week off while I had the flu.)
Tsutomu Yamaguchi died from stomach cancer. The cancer part perhaps isn’t surprising given that Yamaguchi is currently the only person officially recognized by the Japanese government as having lived through the atomic bombings of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (Note: There were actually well over a 100 or so others as well, perhaps as many as 165; they just have never been officially recognized by the Japanese government to date.) What is surprising, given that history, is that Yamaguchi avoided the disease for so long, not dying until January 4, 2010, at the age of 93.
At the age of 29, Yamaguchi was on his way back home from a three month long business trip to Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. At the time, he was an engineer for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries- specifically, working as an oil tanker designer. On his way to the train station to head back to his home in Nagasaki, he noticed he’d forgotten his travel permit and went back to get it while his colleagues, Akira Iwanaga and Kuniyoshi Sato, went on.
He picked up his pass and was on his way back to the station when, at 8:15 a.m., he saw a bomber flying over the city and “two small parachutes”, then a rush of blinding light, sound, wind, and heat knocked him to the ground. Mr. Yamaguchi had the misfortune of being approximately 3 km from a nuclear blast. The immediate effects of this were his ear drums rupturing, temporarily blindness, and burns over much of his upper body.
After his initial disorientation, and in spite of his injuries, Tsutomu managed to make his way to an air-raid shelter where he met up with his two colleagues who had also survived the blast. He spent the night in the shelter and in the morning he and his co-workers headed back to Nagasaki via train as originally planned. When he arrived, he received bandage treatments from a local hospital, and even felt well enough to report for work on August the 9th, just 3 days later… (Now I feel like a bit of a pansy about taking a full week off while I had the flu.)