WILMINGTON – In the summer of 1945, Tsutomu Yamaguchi was preparing to head home after a 3-month long business trip in Hiroshima, Japan.
He enjoyed his work as a draftsman in charge of designing oil tankers for the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Corporation but was excited to return home to his family after being gone for so long.
On the morning of August 6th, Yamaguchi was headed to the local train station with two of his fellow colleagues when he realized that he had forgotten his travel papers back at the office.
He separated from his two co-workers and resigned to catching a later train home, after he had recovered his travel documents.
At 8:15 a.m., as Yamaguchi was walking back to his workplace, he heard a low, faint, rumble overhead.
Looking up, he spotted the American bomber plane, The Enola Gay, gradually approaching the city.
Yamaguchi watched as the Enola Gay slowly made its way towards the city center of Hiroshima (about a mile and half away from where he was standing) and soon witnessed two small parachutes descend.
One of those parachutes was attached to a nuclear warhead, codenamed Little Boy.
A moment later there was a tremendous flash in the sky followed by a deafening roar of wind and debris.
Yamaguchi was blown over by the force and suffered extensive burns over the left half of his body.
The explosion was powerful enough to rupture both of his ear drums and stricken him with temporary blindness.
Shaken, but alive, Yamaguchi made his way out of the rubble that had been his office building and headed off to look for his two co-workers whom he had left at the train station.
Miraculously, they both had survived the blast as well.
The group huddled together and spent the night in an air-raid shelter before (finally) returning to Nagasaki the next day.
Once back home in Nagasaki, Yamaguchi sought medical care for his injuries, rested for a single day, and promptly showed up for work on the morning of August 9th.
Yamaguchi, limping and heavily bandaged, apologized to his supervisor for being a few days late to report back to work, and described how a single bomb had destroyed the city of Hiroshima only a few days earlier.
As the power of a nuclear bomb had never before been seen, Yamaguchi’s supervisor didn’t believe his story and called him crazy for thinking that such things were even possible.
At 11 a.m., a second nuclear bomb (Fat Man) was detonated over the city of Nagasaki.
Yamaguchi was (again) about a mile and half from the explosion but was unharmed by this blast.
Although suffering from some radiation-related health issues such as cataracts and leukemia in his later years, Yamaguchi nevertheless enjoyed a relatively normal and healthy life, despite his tough work week in the summer of ’45.
In 2009, a year before he died of stomach cancer at the age of 93, Tsutomu Yamaguchi became the only person officially recognized by the Japanese government as having survived both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear explosions.
Try to remember Yamaguchi the next time you are having a tough week at work and realize that it could most definitely be much worse.
