Tsutomu Yamaguchi: The man who survived both atomic bombs

RNZ News

a day ago

By
James Oaten
, ABC News
A nuclear bomb explodes over Nagasaki.
Photo:
Creative Commons
There are not many people who have survived a nuclear attack. There is only one person who officially survived two.
On this day, 80 years ago, young engineer Tsutomu Yamaguchi was telling his boss about the horrors he had seen in the Japanese city of Hiroshima when the room went blindingly white.
"I thought the mushroom cloud had followed me from Hiroshima,"
he told
UK Newspaper,
The Independent
.
Yamaguchi was an engineer with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries when the United States dropped atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Yamaguchi, then 29, was in Hiroshima for a business trip when the bomb known as 'Little Boy' was deployed, killing tens of thousands in a flash, and leaving scores with burns so severe their skin draped off their bodies.
The young engineer was around three kilometres from ground zero and suffered temporary blindness and deafness in one eardrum.
After staying in a bomb shelter the first night with other survivors, he quickly made his way back to his hometown of Nagasaki.
Then on 9 August, 1945, he went to work and told his colleagues about the horrors he saw.
"When they realised that I had returned from Hiroshima, everyone gathered around me and said, 'I'm glad you're alive,' and 'great that you have survived,'" he recounted to Japanese broadcaster NHK.
But his boss did not believe him.
"He replied, 'You're badly injured, aren't you? Your head must be damaged too. I can't believe what you're saying. How could a single bomb destroy such a vast area like Hiroshima?'"
Just at that moment, the United States dropped its second atomic bomb, known as 'Fat Man', killing some 40,000 people instantly.
"I immediately recognised it as an atomic bomb," he told NHK.
"I hid under a desk right away."
The city of Nagasaki will pause today to remember the atomic blast that inflicted so much horror on the unsuspecting city.
Within months, 74,000 people were dead after radiation sickness took hold.
The bombing of Nagasaki is often overshadowed by the deadlier and earlier attack on Hiroshima, which killed some 140,000 people by year's end.
Part of the tragedy of Nagasaki is it was not the original intended target.
Two B-29 bombers were sent to destroy the industrial city of Kokura, which was a major hub for ammunition manufacturing.
But the city was hidden under cloud cover, so the pilots diverted to their secondary target: Nagasaki.
Tsutomu Yamaguchi in 2008.
Photo:
JIJI PRESS / AFP
About 165 people are thought to have survived both atomic blasts, known as nijyuu hibakusha.
But Yamaguchi is the only person to be officially recognised by the local governments of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
For decades, he kept his unique story under wraps and worked a blue-collar job.
Many atomic bomb survivors, known as hibakusha, feel compelled to speak out, hoping their experiences will spur the world to abandon nuclear weapons.
But the family of Yamaguchi feared he looked too healthy, which would undermine the message of survivors.
"My entire family opposed it," his daughter Toshiko Yamasaki explained at a peace conference in 2011.
"If my father, who had survived two atomic bombings, engaged in peace activities, people might think, 'even after being exposed to radiation twice, he's still healthy, so the atomic bomb isn't scary.'"
The destruction in Hiroshima after the nuclear explosion, on 6 August 1945.
Photo:
Supplied
But Yamaguchi did suffer a lifetime of health problems, as is often the case for hibakusha due to radiation exposure.
"My father had cataracts, was deaf in one ear, suffered from leukopenia, lost his hair for 15 years after the war, and had after-effects from burns," Toshiko explained.
His family endured sickness, too. His wife and son died of cancer.
It was only in his final decade that Yamaguchi started to speak more openly, hoping his ordeal would help in the fight against nuclear weapons.
"I have walked and crawled through the bottom of hell," he told the ABC in 2009.
"I should be dead. But it was my fate to keep on living."
Irish journalist David McNeill was one of the last journalists to interview him before his death.
"What struck me was how modest he was," he explained.
"Like many hibakusha, he really didn't want to discuss his extraordinary life. He had to be pressed into it because he thought he was better off than many of the people who surrounded him, who were getting sick and dying from cancer."
Yamaguchi died in 2010, aged 93.
The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were one of the final and most devastating acts of World War II.
After the first nuclear attack, Japan would still not surrender, instead deciding to send a fact-finding team to the city after communications went dark.
The second attack on Nagasaki was part of the American strategy to make Japan believe it had unlimited supplies of such bombs.
Many historians argue the Soviet Union declaring war on Japan was more influential in securing Japan's surrender, as it suddenly exposed its entire unprotected north.
Making a single uranium bomb that exploded over Hiroshima was incredibly challenging and chewed up much of the budget and resourcing of the multi-year Manhattan Project.
Japan knew how challenging it would be.
But the United States had also developed a plutonium bomb - far easier and cheaper than a uranium bomb.
This is what detonated over Nagasaki.
And the commander of the Manhattan Project boasted the United States could then create two or three atomic bombs a month to assist in the planned land invasion of Japan, scheduled for November 1945.
"They had the capacity to make two or three bombs a month by that point," Professor Mordecai Sheftall from Shizuoka explains.
"Because the plutonium production facilities in Hanford, Washington State, were going at full tilt."
Japan finally surrendered on 15 August, but only after the emperor intervened and broke a deadlock in his war council.
The army still wanted to fight on.
There are few hibakusha left old enough to remember the blasts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
But the survivors are still determined to keep telling their stories.
After all, those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.
"As a double atomic bomb survivor, I experienced the bomb twice," Yamaguchi told
The Independent
in 2010.
"I sincerely hope that there will not be a third."
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ABC News