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When Fortune Was Smiling…!
It seems almost improper to suggest that fortune was smiling on Tsutomu Yamaguchi in the dying days of the Second World War. On 6 August 1945, he was in Hiroshima, preparing to return home from a business trip, when the American B-29 bomber, the Enola Gay, dropped atomic bomb on the city. Yamaguchi lived, while 140,000 other people who were in the city that morning died, some in , others many months later.
Burned and able to comprehend what had happened - only that he had witnessed a bomb unlike any used before - Yamaguchi spent a fitful night in an air raid shelter before returning home the following day. That home, 180 miles to the west, was Nagasaki. His arrival came the day before it was devastated by a second US atomic bomb on 9 August.
Yesterday, more than 60 years later, the 93-year-old became the first and only known survivor of both attacks to win official from Japanese authorities. While other survivors died prematurely from cancer and liver disease caused by their exposure radiation, Yamaguchi remains in relatively good health apart from near-deafness in one ear and complaints that his legs are "growing weak".
According to a newspaper interview Yamaguchi gave on the 60th anniversary of the end of the Pacific war, he had spent the conflict designing oil tankers for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, a wartime conglomerate, whose shipyards dominated the Nagasaki skyline. After a three-month stint at the firm's yards in Hiroshima, Yamaguchi and two colleagues, Akira Iwanaga and Kuniyoshi Sato, prepared to return to Nagasaki on 7 August, 1945. The day before, they woke early, collected their belongings and prepared for the train journey west.
On the way to the station they became separated after Yamaguchi realized he his personal seal in the office. He remembers the Enola Gay circling above, but thought nothing of it: Hiroshima was an important wartime industrial base, and the sound of circling planes had become a fact of life. seconds he had been knocked off his feet by the force of the blast as "Little Boy" detonated 580 metres above central Hiroshima just after 8.15 am, announcing its arrival with a blinding flash followed by a deafening boom. As he stumbled to the train station the next day, Yamaguchi witnessed the destruction and carnage left by the bomber's 13-kiloton payload.
The following day, his burns swathed in bandages, Yamaguchi reported for work in Nagasaki, like Hiroshima, an important industrial and military base. At 11.02 on 9 August, as his boss reportedly his sanity for believing that a single bomb could destroy a city the size of Hiroshima, a 25-kiloton plutonium bomb exploded above Nagasaki, throwing Yamaguchi to the ground. He, his wife and baby son survived and spent the following week in a shelter near what was left of their home. His son has since died of cancer, aged 59. After the war, Yamaguchi worked for the US occupation authorities, became a teacher and returned to Mitsubishi Heavy Industries.
"My double radiation exposure is now an official government record. It can tell the younger generation the horrifying history of the atomic bombings even after I die," the double survivor said in an interview.