Yamaguchi Tsutomu (山口彊) , one of the few people to have survived both atomic bombs in Japan, passed away on January 4, 2010, at the age of 93. A firm believer in love and in the dignity of human beings, Mr Yamaguchi spent his later years campaigning against nuclear proliferation and even called upon the United Nations General Assembly to ban all nuclear weapons.
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Tsutomu Yamaguchi was a respected teacher and a beloved father and grandfather. So far, so unusual. But Mr Yamaguchi, who has died in Nagasaki at the age of 93, was special. He was one of the small number of people to fall victim to both the atomic bombs that fell on Japan 64 years ago.
On August 6, 1945, he was about to leave the city of Hiroshima, where he had been working for a few weeks, when the first bomb exploded, killing 140,000 people. Stunned and injured, he fled to his home town, Nagasaki, 180 miles to the west. There, on August 9, the second atomic bomb exploded over his head.A few dozen other people were in the same position, but none expressed the experience, or the indignation which it inspired, with as much emotion and fervour.
Towards the end of his life, Mr Yamaguchi became the only man to be officially registered as a hibakusha, or atomic bomb victim, in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
“I think that it is a miracle,” he told The Times, on the 60th anniversary of the bombings in 2005. “But, having been granted this miracle, it is my responsibility to pass on the truth to the people of the world. For the past 60 years, atomic bomb survivors have declared the horror of the atomic bomb, but I can see hardly any improvement in the situation.”
In the summer of 1945, he was 29, and working as a technical draughtsman designing oil tankers for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. His three-month secondment to a shipyard in Hiroshima was due to end on the morning of August 6, the day that the American B-29 bomber Enola Gay dropped a 13 kiloton uranium atomic bomb which exploded above Hiroshima at 8.15am.
“I didn’t know what had happened,” Mr Yamaguchi went on. “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. I thought I might have died, but eventually the darkness cleared and I realised I was alive.”
With burns on his face and arms, he and two colleagues staggered through the ruins of the city, where the dead and dying lay all around. At one point, the three men had to wade through a river, parting before them a floating carpet of corpses. They reached the station, and forced their way on to the train for Nagasaki. Reporting to work at the shipyard the next day, August 9, his story of a single bomb destroying an entire city was met with incredulity.
“The director was angry. He said: ‘You’ve obviously been badly injured, and I think you’ve gone a little mad.’ At that moment, outside the window, I saw another flash and the whole office, everything in it, was blown over.”
The next thing he remembered was waking from a delirium to hear crying and cheering at the broadcast by Emperor Hirohito announcing Japan’s surrender.
A post-war career as a teacher and a long retirement followed, and Mr Yamaguchi rarely spoke publicly of his experiences. He began to do so only in 2005 after the death from cancer of his middle-aged son, Katsutoshi, a death which his father attributed to his exposure to radiation as an infant.
“The son of 59 died, leaving the father of 89 behind,” he said. “He was still a baby to me. The death of my son takes away my will to live.”
Like most hibakusha, Mr Yamaguchi’s hatred of the bomb never expressed itself in anti-Americanism. One of his last visitors, as he lay dying of stomach cancer late last month, was the US film director, James Cameron, who is considering making a film about the atomic bombs.
“I believe in love, in human beings,” he said. “The reason that I hate the atomic bomb is because of what it does to the dignity of human beings.
"Look at the photographs of the aftermath of the atomic bombing, those dead bodies in the photographs. When you forget the dignity of individual human beings, that it is when you are heading towards the destruction of the Earth.”
Source : The Times Online.
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Rest in peace, Yamaguchi-san. May we all live to see the day when nuclear weapons are a thing of the past.
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