Despite never showing the atomic bombings in Japan, Oppenheimer has completed its mission of returning the nuclear discussion to the forefront. The bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima are, to this day, heavily debated by scientists and civilians alike. Some might argue that the atomic bombings were the nature of war, while others defend that civilians were made the collateral damage of wars they were dragged into. In 2023, it's difficult to justify war anywhere, but we can all agree that, in war, it's always the civilians that pay the price.
Such is the story of Tsutomu Yamaguchi, a man who, by all appearances, was just another citizen of the Japanese Empire at the height of WWII. But the events that unfolded in Nagasaki and Hiroshima would change his life-and end 210,000 other lives-forever.
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Born in 1916 in the Empire of Japan, Yamaguchi was a marine engineer who hailed from Nagasaki. He worked from Mitsubishi Heavy Industries at the height of the war, which, like many Japanese, he never agreed with in the first place. Despite coming from Nagasaki, it was the Hiroshima bomb that he first encountered after a badly timed business trip led him into the city.
On the day of the Hiroshima bombing, August 6, 1945, Yamaguchi was just about to leave Hiroshima and return home, but on the way to the train station, he found that he'd forgotten his hanko (signature stamp) and was walking toward the docks when it happened-an American plane dropped Little Boy before his eyes. Yamaguchi shared that he'd seen the bomber and two small parachutes before it exploded on Hiroshima. Just before the explosion, he dove into a ditch to shield himself. The atomic bomb ruptured his eardrums, temporarily blinded him, and caused serious radiation burns.
"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," said Ttsutomu.
Had he not forgotten his hanko, Yamaguchi might have escaped the bomb unscathed, but instead, he ended up seriously wounded and crawling to shelter to ride out his wounds. After finding his friends, Yamaguchi walked by corpses and swam through floating dead bodies just to reach the train station. The scene, described by Yamaguchi, was an apocalyptic nightmare: unending fires, destroyed buildings, and dead-eyed gazes. Yamaguchi eventually returned home to Nagasaki, thinking all was safe.
Then the U.S. dropped Fat Man on his hometown.
Just as he was recounting the bombing in Hiroshima to his colleagues at work, and being dubbed crazy by his boss, the sky flashed white. Another bomb had arrived. While he was uninjured by the second bombing, Yamaguchi rushed home to check on his wife and young son. What he found was another miraculous turn of events: His wife, Hisako, had chosen that precise moment to fetch burn ointment for her husband, which ultimately saved her from being crushed by the part of their house that had collapsed. Both mother and baby were safe.
Luckily (if you could call it that), Yamaguchi didn't sustain direct wounds from the explosion, but it did cause his already serious injuries from Hiroshima to worsen. Yamaguchi never regained all of his health-he was rendered permanently deaf in one ear, and for years, he lived life in bandages. Radiation-related illnesses hounded him in later years, such as cataracts, acute leukemia, and stomach cancer. His wife, who also survived Nagasaki, later died of radiation-related kidney and liver cancer. Even their children together reported health problems as a domino effect of the nuclear fallout.
Yamaguchi did survive, but not without scarring-of the physical and emotional variety. In his later years, Yamaguchi developed a staunch position against the use of atomic weapons, regularly speaking at events and gatherings. How could he not when the universe appeared to have conspired to keep him alive? In one interview, he pondered why even after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, people still considered nuclear weapons an option: "I can't understand why the world cannot understand the agony of the nuclear bombs. How can they keep developing these weapons?"
His book, A Life Well-Lived, recorded his experiences and trauma in poetry, and he further shared his experiences in the 2006 documentary Twice Survived: The Double Atomic Bombed of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The documentary featured 165 survivors of both bombs, but strangely enough, Yamaguchi was the only double survivor recognized by the Japanese government. Never one to seek attention, Yamaguchi did see his double miracles as an act of destiny, one that might need to be immortalized in a government recognition for the sake of future generations: "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 right. On January 4, 2010, Yamaguchi died at 93 years old. But his legacy is a stark warning to those who would consider igniting nuclear war.
The events surrounding the atomic bombings are murky. Historians can't ignore that the bombings happened as a result of Japan waging war on Asia and allying with the Germans. There are countless records of the atrocities that were committed by the Japanese imperial army. Yet it was the civilians, not the soldiers, who paid the price for the decisions of others. That's where the morality of the atomic bombings is still contested to this day.
Regardless of what one might argue, it's universally agreed that the bombings were a turning point in history. Never had something so catastrophic been commanded so quickly and so easily than the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As Oppenheimer portrayed (or didn't portray), there was little tangible impact of the bombings on the people who pushed the button. But in Japan, there were no words large enough to encompass the terror and tragedy of 1945. In fact, they were forced to create a new word entirely-hibakusha, a title bestowed on the survivors of the bombs and persons affected by its radioactivity. In the case of Tsutomu Yamaguchi, it's niju hibakusha, a survivor of both bombs-both reckonings.
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