The Man Who Survived Both Atomic Bombs

Tsutomu Yamaguchi was 29 years old and on a three-month business trip for Mitsubishi in Hiroshima. August 6, 1945, was supposed to be his last day in the city before returning home to his wife and infant son in Nagasaki. At 8:15 AM, while walking to the shipyard, he saw an American B-29 drop a small object. The sky erupted in a flash of light, and the blast threw him into a potato patch, rupturing his eardrums and severely burning his upper body. After a night in a bomb shelter, Yamaguchi navigated a horrifying landscape of fire and death to reach a still-operating train station. He boarded a train packed with other burned and bewildered survivors for the overnight journey home. He arrived in Nagasaki on August 8, so badly wounded that his own mother thought he was a ghost. Despite his injuries and a raging fever, he reported to his Mitsubishi office on the morning of August 9 to report on the events in Hiroshima. Around 11 AM, Yamaguchi was in a meeting with his director, trying to explain the unbelievable devastation he had witnessed. His boss was skeptical, declaring that a single bomb could not possibly destroy an entire city. As Yamaguchi struggled to make him understand, the room was lit by another blinding white flash. The second atomic bomb had detonated over Nagasaki. "I thought the mushroom cloud had followed me from Hiroshima," he later said. The building's reinforced structure saved him from the immediate blast, and he survived his second nuclear explosion in three days. Despite the double dose of radiation, which he said "seemed to have canceled each other out," Tsutomu Yamaguchi lived a long life. He and his wife, who also suffered from radiation poisoning from the Nagasaki blast, had two more children. He became a vocal opponent of nuclear weapons later in life, speaking at the United Nations and with international visitors. He died of stomach cancer in 2010 at the age of 93. He is the only person officially recognized by the government of Japan as having survived both atomic bombings—a man who stood in the heart of two nuclear infernos and walked out twice.