Yamaguchi, who lived in Nagasaki and he died from
stomach cancer. The cancer part maybe isn’t surprising given that
Yamaguchi was the only person officially recognized by the Japanese government
as having lived through the atomic bombings of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There
were actually well over a 100 or so others as well, possibly as many as 165;
they just have never been officially recognized by the Japanese government.
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 that time, he was an engineer for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries- specially,
working as an oil tanker designer. When he was on his way to the train station
to head back to his home in Nagasaki, he abruptly noticed he had forgotten his
travel permit and went back to get it while his colleagues, Akira Iwanaga
and Kuniyoshi Sato, went on.
Yamaguchi picked up his pass and was on his way
back to the station when, at time was 8:15a.m., He says. it was very clear, a
surely fine day, nothing strange about it at all. I was in good spirits. As I
was walking along I heard the sound of a plane, just one. I looked up into the
sky and saw the B-29, and it dropped two parachutes. I was looking up at them,
and suddenly it was like a flash of magnesium, a great flash in the sky, and I
was blown over. 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 bad luck of being about 3 kilometer from a
nuclear blast.
The abrupt effects of
this were his ear drums rupturing, provisionally 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 coworkers who had also survived the blast. He spent his
night in the shelter and in the morning he and his colleagues headed back to
Nagasaki through train as originally planned. When he arrived, he
received bandage treatments from a local hospital, and when he 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.
Of course, Yamaguchi had to explain his burns to
his colleagues. His manager was in disbelief over his claim that it was a
single explosion that destroyed much of Hiroshima. You’re an engineer,” he said
to Tsutomu, “calculate it how could one bomb destroy an entire city?” The manager
spoke too soon. According to Yamaguchi, during this conversation the air-raid
sirens went off and then, once again, he saw a blinding white light. He dropped
to the floor instantly; he was familiar with the drill. I thought the mushroom
cloud had followed me from Hiroshima.
Both bombs exploded near the city centers and both
were just about three kilometers away from Tsutomu’s position at the
time. In spite of this heavy explosion being slightly more powerful than
the one at Hiroshima (21 kilotons vs. 16 kilotons at Hiroshima), thanks to the
city’s uneven terrain and the fact that several parts of the city were divided
by water, which prevented the widespread fire damage that happened in
Hiroshima, there wasn’t almost the amount of overall infrastructure damage.
Yamaguchi himself experienced no immediate injury from this second explosion,
though of course was exposed to another high dose of ionizing radiation and
medical supplies to treat his existing burns were now in short supply.
Stimulatingly, Yamaguchi almost didn’t have to go
through this ordeal twice. Nagasaki was not the original target for the
second nuke- that was the city of Kokura. However, thanks to a cloud
covering Kokura when the US bomber arrived, they had to divert to a secondary
target, Nagasaki, as the mission stipulated that they were not to drop the bomb
unless they had a visual of the target. When the bomber arrived at
Nagasaki, they also found substantial cloud cover, but they were low on fuel,
it was not likely to divert to another target, so they made their run anyways,
despite their orders. When they got close, just before releasing, they
did have a brief visual to confirm their location before dropping the
bomb. Had they had more fuel or there not been a cloud cover over Kokura,
Yamaguchi and a not insignificant portion of the Japanese population would have
had their lives extremely changed, obviously some for the good and some for the
bad.
Amazingly, unlike so many others who experienced
even just one of the blasts, Yamaguchi went on to live a long and healthy life
with the only major permanent physical health problem as the result of the
bombings being the loss of hearing in his left ear, however the burns took some
time to heal; he briefly lost all his hair; and he experienced a great deal of
psychological trauma, as one might expect. He and his wife, Hisako, even
went on to have children, who all turned out perfectly healthy, which at least
at the time, not so much today, was thought to be something of a wonder considering
both parents had been exposed to such intense levels of ionizing radiation.
Yamaguchi’s wife lived to 88, dying of kidney and
liver cancer. Yamaguchi himself lived to the ripe old age of 93 years old
and for most of his life made little mention of the fact that he would been
present at both bombings. He originally just registered as a survivor of
Nagasaki. According to one of his daughters, his perceptive for
downplaying this, and not registering as a survivor of Hiroshima as well, was
his robust health through most of his life. He felt it would be insolent
to the many thousands who were not so fortunate, health-wise.
When he reaches in his 80′s, he changed his
stance, breaking his silence on the matter and officially applying for
recognition as a survivor of both blasts, which was granted by the Japanese
government in 2009, shortly before his death. He then dedicated the rest of his
life to campaigning for the disarmament of nuclear weapons from all
nations. He even wrote a book outlining his experience, which included
many poems he wrote about the event Raft of Corpses. In spite it all, Yamaguchi
considered himself very lucky. As he said shortly before his death, I
could have died on either of those days and everything that follows in my life
is a bonus.
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