Unluckiest Man in History

On a morning like this exactly 70 years ago, Tsutomu Yamaguchi was finally finishing a three-month business trip in Hiroshima. An engineer and a draftsman by trade, he had just completed the design of a 5,000-ton tanker for his company, Mitsubishi.

With his work done, he and two colleagues were walking to the train station when he realized he had forgotten his hanko (a stamp allowing him to travel). So, at 8:15 a.m., he headed back to the office. Just as he got off a streetcar, he saw a plane, high up in the sky, drop something silvery.

The plane was the Enola Gay and the silvery object was “Little Boy,” a four-ton nuclear bomb powered by uranium 235 that was equivalent to 12.5 kilotons of dynamite.

Yamaguchi recalls “a great flash in the sky, and I was blown over.” The explosion, with Ground Zero less than two miles away, ruptured his eardrums, temporarily blinded him and knocked him unconscious. He suffered serious burns over half his body.

Yamaguchi recalls “a great flash in the sky, and I was blown over.”

But he was lucky. More than 140,000 Japanese perished in Hiroshima.

When Yamaguchi awoke, there was only ash and fire all around him. The city was dark, though it was still early morning. He stood, dazed, and thought he should return to the Mitsubishi building. Only it wasn’t there. It had been reduced to rubble.

The story gets foggy from here. Some reports say he spent the night in a shelter. Others say he tried to get to the train station, but the bridges were out. He went to the river, tried to crawl across a mass of corpses, but couldn’t. Then he found a single railroad beam that crossed the water and tightrope-walked it to the other side, where he found that the trains were indeed still running.

Dazed, injured, but finally, on Aug. 7, he was going home, to Nagasaki.

That’s right, Nagasaki.

Suffering from radiation poisoning — which causes headaches, vomiting, peeling skin, internal bleeding — Yamaguchi got home and found his wife and two-year-old son. He rested for a day, drifting in and out of consciousness.

But on Aug. 9, just as he had in Hiroshima, he left early to go to the Mitsubishi offices in Nagasaki. At 11 a.m., he was describing what happened in Hiroshima to his skeptical boss — a whole city vaporized by a single bomb, you say — when wouldn’t you know it….

Miraculously, though 70,000 people were killed that morning, Yamaguchi suffered no injuries in the second blast.

A Boeing B-29 Superfortress nicknamed Bockscar flying above the clouds dropped a plutonium bomb code named “Fat Man” — this one weighed five tons and packed a punch equivalent to 21 kilotons of TNT. It exploded at 1,800 feet above the city, and once again, Yamaguchi was less than two miles from Ground Zero.

Miraculously, though 70,000 people were killed that morning, Yamaguchi suffered no injuries in the second blast. And he lived a long life afterward, until the age of 93. He passed away in 2010.

While there were more than 150 people who were in both cities when the bombs hit — so many they had a term to describe them, “nijyuu hibakusha” — Yamaguchi was the only person to be certified by the Japanese government as having been within two miles of Ground Zero in each.

“My double radiation exposure is now an official government record. It can tell the younger generation the horrifying history of the atomic bombings even after I die,” he was quoted as saying in the Mainichi newspaper.

His saga also provides another lesson: The next time you think about burning a vacation day because you feel a little under the weather, suck it up and get your butt to work. Tsutomu Yamaguchi survived a nuclear explosion —- on a Monday no less — and still got back to work by Thursday.

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