Video: How an ordinary Japanese man managed to survive 2 nuclear strikes - in Hiroshima and Nagasaki - and live to be 93 years old
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
Tsutomu Yamaguchi is sometimes ranked among the happiest people on the planet, then, on the contrary, among the most unhappy. On August 6, 1945, he was on a business trip to Hiroshima. Miraculously surviving a terrible explosion, the Japanese boarded a train and went home to Nagasaki … It is believed that there were more than a hundred such "lucky ones", but Yamaguchi was the only person whose presence in Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the bombing was officially recognized.
During the war, Tsutomu Yamaguchi was a promising engineer, worked for Mitsubishi. He had a wife and a small child. In August 1945, Yamaguchi was sent on a business trip, in Hiroshima, he participated in the construction of an oil tanker. The explosion found him at the shipyard. Tsutomu managed to notice an American bomber in the sky and saw a bright flash, immediately followed by a wave of suffocating heat. The man was lucky, there was a hole nearby, into which he managed to jump, but the blast wave overtook him and threw him several meters.
Yamaguchi survived a nuclear explosion while located about three kilometers from the epicenter. About 80 thousand people died in Hiroshima that day. For surviving victims in Japan, there is a special term - "hibakusha". Tsutomu was lucky to become one of them, but the man was wounded and could hardly move. With difficulty he found two colleagues who also survived, and the three of them, helping each other, they were able to get to the bomb shelter, where all the victims were given first aid.
Japan only later realized what the nuclear strikes meant. In the early days, most people knew nothing about radiation sickness or radioactive contamination. Three Mitsubishi employees decided to go home to Nagasaki. Fortunately, the railroad was not damaged, so the next day they were able to catch the train.
After reaching home, Yamaguchi went to the hospital, and the very next day, August 9, despite multiple burns and bruises, the disciplined Japanese man showed up for work. He just had time to tell the boss about what happened in Hiroshima. He did not believe that just one bomb could cause such harm to a huge city, but then the sky was lit up by a flash that eclipsed the light of the sun … Tsutomu was lucky again, he was thrown into a small shelter.
Again, the distance to the explosion was three kilometers, again he turned out to be one of the few survivors, but this time he did not even receive any special injuries - it looked like a miracle. He saw the second miracle when, in horror, he ran home through the dilapidated city: his wife and son also survived a terrible blow - they went to the pharmacy for medicines for dad and at the moment of the explosion ended up in an underground tunnel.
Of course, in subsequent years, the whole family experienced the consequences of radioactive exposure, but nevertheless for them the terrible test turned out to be not as fatal as for hundreds of thousands of Japanese. Tsutomu and his wife lived to a very old age, they had two more children. For many years, Yamaguchi did not draw attention to himself. He received the status of a survivor in Nagasaki, but did not report his double "luck".
It was only in 2009 that he applied for double recognition, and the Japanese government confirmed it. This made Yamaguchi the only person officially recognized as a survivor of both explosions. Towards the end of his life, Tsutomu became more and more worried about the world problem of atomic weapons. In the 80s, he wrote a book of memoirs, performed a lot to tell the younger generation about the horror he had experienced. Tsutomu Yamaguchi and his wife passed away at the age of 93.
I would like to mention one hard-hitting fact. In December 2010, the BBC introduced Yamaguchi on the author's program Quite Interesting. The show's host Stephen Fry called the Japanese "the most unfortunate person in the world," and then managed to make a sloppy joke about what Yamaguchi had to endure. Laughter in the audience after the words that, amazed the entire civilized world.
The Japanese Embassy protested and stated that the program. The BBC Corporation made an official apology, and Pierce Fletcher, the producer of the program, responded with the words:.
Yamaguchi's daughter, speaking on Japanese television, perfectly expressed the flurry of indignation that swept across Japan. The woman, who until the age of twelve saw her father only in bandages, said:. Stephen Fry, who is revered in Britain almost as a national hero, was forced to postpone the shooting of his new documentary in Japan, fearing to travel to the country he offended.
Probably, English journalists would not have allowed such tactlessness if, in preparation for the program, they got acquainted with the aching photographs about the atomic bombing of 1945, telling about the tragedy in Hiroshima
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