Tsutomu Yamaguchi RIP

Adrian Roberts · Jan 11, 2010

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/6943088/Tsutomu-Yamaguchi.html

Tsutomu Yamaguchi, who died on January 4 aged 93, was the only person officially recognised to have survived the atom bomb attacks on both Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of the Second World War.

Yamaguchi, who lived in Nagasaki, happened to be in Hiroshima on business on August 6 1945, when the American B-29 Enola Gay dropped "Little Boy" on the city. He was due to leave the next day, having completed a three-month assignment for the shipbuilding division of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries.

At 8.15am he was making his way towards the shipyard. "It was a flat, open spot with potato fields on either side," he said in an interview in 2005. "It was very clear, a really fine day, nothing unusual 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."

Yamaguchi passed out. When he recovered consciousness, his first thought was that he was dead: "When the noise and the blast had subsided I saw a huge mushroom-shaped pillar of fire rising up high into the sky. It was like a tornado, although it didn't move, but it rose and spread out horizontally at the top. There was prismatic light, which was changing in a complicated rhythm, like the patterns of a kaleidoscope. The first thing I did was to check that I still had my legs and whether I could move them. I thought, 'If I stay here, I'll die'."

He made his way to an air-raid shelter, where he discovered that he had burns on his upper body. Two hours later he continued his journey to the shipyard, where he found many of his colleagues still alive. Among them were Akira Iwanaga and Kuniyoshi Sato, who were also from Nagasaki and would also survive the second atom bomb; they, however, have not been officially recognised as "double-survivors".

The three men returned to their lodgings to retrieve their possessions, encountering a scene of total devastation as they went: "There were burned people, children as well as adults, some of them dead, some of them on the verge of death."

They spent the night in another shelter, then went to the railway station to board a train which took them to Nagasaki, where Yamaguchi was treated in a hospital. Despite being swathed in bandages, he reported for work the next morning, August 9.

Just after 11am he was talking to his boss when there was an enormous flash, and "the whole office, everything in it, was blown over". A second B-29, Bockscar, had dropped an even bigger atom bomb, known as "Fat Man".

On this occasion Yamaguchi was unhurt, and he managed to make his way home, where he found his wife and son safe. His bandages, however, were in tatters; the hospital was in ruins; and for a week he lay in the shelter at his home suffering from a high fever. On August 15 he heard that Japan had surrendered.

Tsutomu Yamaguchi was born on March 16 1916. In his twenties he joined Mitsubishi as a technical draughtsman designing oil tankers. "I never thought Japan should start a war," he once said. "Soon we were running out of iron, steel and oil, but the tankers bringing in the oil were constantly being sunk by submarines."

So despondent was he that he considered, in the event of Japan losing the war, killing his wife and baby son with an overdose of sleeping pills.

After the surrender however, he worked as a translator for the American forces in Nagasaki. He later became a schoolmaster before, finally, returning to Mitsubishi.

His official status as a double survivor was confirmed only in March last year, but he was already well known for the talks he gave about his experiences, often expressing his hope that nuclear weapons would be abolished. He wrote books and songs, and appeared in a television documentary. In 2006 he addressed the UN.

"Having been granted this miracle," he said, "it is my responsibility to pass on the truth to the people of the world."

Shortly before Christmas he was visited in hospital by the film director James Cameron, who made Titanic and Avatar and is now said to be thinking about making a movie about nuclear weapons.

Some 140,000 people were killed in Hiroshima and 70,000 in Nagasaki; many of the 260,000 or so people who survived suffered from the effects of radiation, with some developing diseases such as cancer. Yamaguchi himself – who gave up smoking and drinking when he was 50 – died of stomach cancer. His son was also killed by cancer, aged 59, and he is survived by his daughter.
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