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Oh no, not again.
Jan. 8th, 2010 10:23 amSurfing for something entirely unrelated the other day, I happened across the obitiuary of Tsutomu Yamaguchi who died earlier this week at the age of 93. If you haven't heard of him, I shouldn't worry about it - I hadn't either until I randomly encountered his name, but as I read his story I found myself thinking that his story was one I should know because Mr. Yamaguchi was a remarkable man.
It's difficult to know how to describe him; depending upon your point of view you could think that he was the one of the luckiest men in the world - or the unluckiest. There's certainly a strong argument for Mr Yamaguchi being the toughest man in the world, because he held a unique distinction. According to the Japanese government, Tsutomu Yamaguchi was the only person officially recognised as having survived not one but two atom bombs being dropped on him.
I suspect this is an acheivement he'd've preferred not to have held.
In 1945 the 21-year-old Tsutomu Yamaguchi worked for the Mitsubishi Corporation, and on the 6th of August he was getting off a tram in Hiroshima for a meeting when Little Boy detonated over the city. He suffered severe burns to his upper body, temporary blindness and a ruptured eardrum. He spent the night in an air-raid shelter and then, reasoning that he would be both happier and safer in his own house than in the devastated ruins of the city, he caught the train back to his home city of Nagasaki where he recieved medical attention.
At this point I could make a pithy comment about people who think that a couple of inches of snow is a fair excuse to take a day or two off work, because, despite his injuries and the fact he'd had a thermonuclear device dropped on him not seventy-two hours earlier, on the 9th of August he displayed the stoical work ethic for which Japan is famous and went to the office - where at 11am he was explaining to his boss what had happened to him in Hiroshima when an all-too-familiar flash went off outside the window as Fat Man exploded about half a mile overhead.
I like to think that he pointed out of the window and said "See? It was just like that", but that's because it's human nature to make light of appalling situations so we don't have to really think about what they mean. Instead, what he actually thought was one of the most despairing comments I've ever read - "I thought for a moment the cloud had followed me from Hiroshima".
For much of his life he was quiet about his experience, but in his eighties he became a vocal proponent of complete nuclear disarmament and addressed the United Nations in 2006, where one suspects most nations just looked shifty and stared at their feet.
His nickname was 'Lucky'. I'm not surprised.
It's difficult to know how to describe him; depending upon your point of view you could think that he was the one of the luckiest men in the world - or the unluckiest. There's certainly a strong argument for Mr Yamaguchi being the toughest man in the world, because he held a unique distinction. According to the Japanese government, Tsutomu Yamaguchi was the only person officially recognised as having survived not one but two atom bombs being dropped on him.
I suspect this is an acheivement he'd've preferred not to have held.
In 1945 the 21-year-old Tsutomu Yamaguchi worked for the Mitsubishi Corporation, and on the 6th of August he was getting off a tram in Hiroshima for a meeting when Little Boy detonated over the city. He suffered severe burns to his upper body, temporary blindness and a ruptured eardrum. He spent the night in an air-raid shelter and then, reasoning that he would be both happier and safer in his own house than in the devastated ruins of the city, he caught the train back to his home city of Nagasaki where he recieved medical attention.
At this point I could make a pithy comment about people who think that a couple of inches of snow is a fair excuse to take a day or two off work, because, despite his injuries and the fact he'd had a thermonuclear device dropped on him not seventy-two hours earlier, on the 9th of August he displayed the stoical work ethic for which Japan is famous and went to the office - where at 11am he was explaining to his boss what had happened to him in Hiroshima when an all-too-familiar flash went off outside the window as Fat Man exploded about half a mile overhead.
I like to think that he pointed out of the window and said "See? It was just like that", but that's because it's human nature to make light of appalling situations so we don't have to really think about what they mean. Instead, what he actually thought was one of the most despairing comments I've ever read - "I thought for a moment the cloud had followed me from Hiroshima".
For much of his life he was quiet about his experience, but in his eighties he became a vocal proponent of complete nuclear disarmament and addressed the United Nations in 2006, where one suspects most nations just looked shifty and stared at their feet.
His nickname was 'Lucky'. I'm not surprised.
