Tsutomu Yamaguchi is dead. It is something of a miracle he lived this long. In August of 1945, he was visiting Hiroshima on business when the Enola Gay dropped the first atomic bomb on the city. He was burned by the blast and suffered ruptured eardrums, but was well enough to return home the next day.
Home was Nagasaki. Three days after the first bomb, Yamaguchi was in his office where "the same white light filled the room." As he said last year,his life could have ended on either of those days, or shortly afterwards due to the effects of the blasts. Everything that followed is a bonus.
Tsutomu Yamaguchi did a lot more with his life after August 1945. A little is below the fold.
Yamaguchi was perhaps one of 165 people who survived both bombs, although municipal official in both cities acknowledge him as the only official survivor of both. He recovered from his wounds and went back to work. An engineer, he spent time working for the American occupation forces. After that, he taught school and worked for Mitsubishi. Amazingly, he lived in relatively good health. His wife also lived to old age, albeit with liver and kidney cancers. He buried a son, lost to cancer, and is survived by two daughters, one chronically ill.
In his later years, Mr. Yamaguchi began to speak out about the scourge of atomic weapons. He rarely gave interviews, but he wrote a memoir and was part of a 2006 documentary film about the double-bombing victims. He called for the abolition of nuclear weapons at a showing of the film at the United Nations that year.
At a lecture he gave in Nagasaki last June, Mr. Yamaguchi said he had written to President Obama about banning nuclear arms.
As Meteor Blades noted yesterday, James Cameron visited Yamaguchi just a couple of weeks ago as the Avatar director considers making a film about the effects of nuclear warfare.
Tsutomu Yamaguchi died of stomach cancer at the age of 93. I hope that remembering his life today will underline efforts made by Plutonium Page on this site and President Obama's efforts to remove nuclear arms from the world's arsenals.
It is said repeatedly when a person dies, but it bears repeating for this man: Tsutomu Yamaguchi, rest in peace.