On the morning of August 6, 1945, a 29-year-old draftsman named Tsutomu Yamaguchi was walking toward the train station in Hiroshima, finally going home. He had spent three months in the city designing an oil tanker for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, and the assignment was over. His bag was packed. His two colleagues were ahead of him. Then he reached for his hanko — the personal name-stamp that stood in for a signature on any Japanese document — and realized he had left it at the office.
He turned around to go back for it.
It is the kind of small administrative errand that vanishes from a life without trace, except that this one put him on a particular stretch of road at a particular minute. At 8:15 a.m., as he walked near the docks, the B-29 Enola Gay released the bomb the Americans had named Little Boy. It detonated above the city about three kilometres from where Yamaguchi stood.
The first flash
He remembered it later as light before sound. “The lightning of a huge magnesium flare,” he called it. Then he was off his feet.
“I didn’t know what had happened,” he said. “I think I fainted for a while. When I opened my eyes, everything was dark, and I couldn’t see much. It was like the start of a film at the cinema before the picture has begun, when the blank frames are just flashing up without any sound.”
The blast had ruptured his eardrums and burned the left side of his upper body. For a while he could not see. When his vision came back, the city around him was gone — flattened, burning, the air full of ash and the smell of it. He found his two colleagues, Akira Iwanaga and Kuniyoshi Sato, both alive, and the three of them spent the night in an air-raid shelter on the city’s edge.
The next day they set out for the station to get home to Nagasaki. The path ran through what was left of Hiroshima. At one river crossing the bridge was gone, and Yamaguchi later said he had to get across through water clogged with the dead. He reached a train that was still running south, climbed aboard among other burned and stunned passengers, and rode through the night to Nagasaki, roughly three hundred kilometres away.
“You’re insane”
Home was a kind of mercy. His wife, Hisako, dressed his burns. A doctor wrapped him in bandages. He was feverish, half-deaf, his skin raw down one side.
On August 9 — three days after Hiroshima — he went back to work.
It seems almost unimaginable now, but the war was still on, the office still expected him, and Yamaguchi was the sort of man who reported in. Bandaged, he stood in front of his Mitsubishi supervisor and tried to explain where he had been and what he had seen: that a single bomb, one bomb, had destroyed the entire city of Hiroshima in a single flash.
The supervisor did not believe him. No one weapon could do that. A bright young engineer back from a hard trip, clearly in shock, was telling him a thing that could not be true, and the man told Yamaguchi as much. He called him insane.
It was a little after eleven in the morning. Yamaguchi was in the middle of arguing the point — describing the flash, the cloud, the wind — when the same white light filled the room.
The cloud that followed him
At 11:02 a.m., the second bomb, Fat Man, detonated over Nagasaki. Yamaguchi’s office was, once again, about three kilometres from the center of the blast.
The windows blew in. He was thrown to the floor. The bandages on his burns held, and this time the geography helped him: Nagasaki sits among hills, and the ridges broke up the force of the explosion in a way that Hiroshima’s flat river plain had not. The man who had just been called a liar for describing a city-killing bomb watched a second one tear open the city he had come home to.
“Suddenly, the same white light filled the room,” he said years later. “I thought the mushroom cloud had followed me from Hiroshima.”
He went looking for his wife and infant son through the ruins, and found them alive; they had gone out for burn ointment and sheltered in a tunnel when the bomb fell. In the days that followed Yamaguchi ran a high fever, his hair came out, he vomited for a week, and the burns festered under bandages no one had the supplies to change. He recovered anyway.
The only one
He was not the sole person caught in both cities. The bombs fell three days apart on industrial towns full of workers and travelers, and historians believe perhaps 160 people lived through both — nijū hibakusha, double-exposed survivors, in the language that grew up around the bombings.
But the Japanese government recognized only one of them for both events. For most of his life Yamaguchi was registered only as a Nagasaki survivor; he had been merely passing through Hiroshima, and he tended not to dwell on the double ordeal in public. He went back to Mitsubishi and kept designing tankers. He raised his children. His wife, herself a Nagasaki survivor, died in 2008 of kidney and liver cancer. Their children grew up with health problems they blamed on what their parents had carried out of those two mornings.
It was only in old age, dying of stomach cancer, that he applied to have both bombings entered onto his record. In March 2009 the government confirmed it: Tsutomu Yamaguchi, the only person it would ever officially recognize as having survived Hiroshima and Nagasaki both. He was glad of it less for himself than for the proof. “My double radiation exposure is now an official government record,” he said. It could tell people, after he was gone, what the bombs had done.
By then he had become a campaigner, telling the story he had once been called mad for telling. He spoke at the United Nations. In December 2009 the filmmaker James Cameron came to his bedside to talk about a nuclear documentary. Yamaguchi had a way of stripping the politics out of it. “The reason that I hate the atomic bomb,” he said, “is because of what it does to the dignity of human beings.”
He died on January 4, 2010, in Nagasaki, at 93 — sixty-four years from the morning he turned back for a rubber stamp and walked into the only century that had bombs like these.