A Forgotten Stamp Changed Everything
In the early hours of August 6, 1945, Tsutomu Yamaguchi was preparing to depart from Hiroshima. For three months he had traveled to work for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries as a designer of oil tankers and this date was his final day of work. At the age of 29 he planned to return to his wife and young son in Nagasaki. As he walked to the dock area, he remembered that his hanko remained at his previous location.
A hanko is a stamp used for personal identification and is required for official travel. Because of this requirement, he returned to retrieve it. When the time reached 8:15 that morning, he was three kilometers away from the central point of Hiroshima. At that moment the sky became colorless and bright. By the force of the pressure wave, he was lifted and moved through the air before he landed in a field of potatoes. Both of his eardrums were broken and he lost his sight for a period of time. On the left side of his upper body, his skin was damaged by heat to an extent that required him to wear medical dressings for many years. To find safety he moved on his hands and knees to a shelter where he discovered that two of his coworkers were alive. For the duration of the night, the three men remained in that location.
To reach the train station on the following day, it was necessary for him to cross a river. The bridges were destroyed. If he wanted to cross, he had to swim through water that contained a high density of deceased individuals.
He traveled by overnight train to his home. When he arrived in Nagasaki and visited the medical facility, the physician who provided treatment was a person he knew from school — yet the physician did not recognize him. His family members also failed to identify him when he entered the house. Due to his appearance, his mother stated that he was a spirit of a deceased person.
But he was a living person. He had severe physical injuries, white cloth strips covering him from his head to his lower arms, and a high body temperature. And yet on the morning of August 9, he stood up and traveled to his place of employment.
The Light Turned White Again
At approximately 11 a.m., he sat across from his manager and attempted to describe the events in Hiroshima — the release of energy, the visual brightness, and how one weapon destroyed the entire city. His manager interrupted him, saying he was injured and that his brain was not functioning correctly. To the manager, it was not possible that a single weapon could ruin a location of that magnitude.
Then the light in the room became bright white again.
The weapon that exploded in Nagasaki had more energy than the one that exploded in Hiroshima three days before. Because the city has many hills and the building had a strong internal structure, the force of the explosion was less intense inside. The cloth strips on his body were removed by the force of the air. The glass in the windows broke into pieces. He moved his body to the floor. When the event concluded, he was still living. For the second time in 72 hours, he was less than two miles away from the center of an atomic explosion.
"I thought the mushroom cloud had followed me from Hiroshima," he later told The Independent.
In the original plan, Nagasaki was not the objective. The aircraft had instructions to fly to Kokura, a city where workers manufactured a large amount of military supplies. The pilots circled until they found the location under a layer of clouds. As they were unable to release the weapon onto a city that was not visible, they moved toward their second objective. The sky over Nagasaki was free of clouds.
A Life of Silence, Then Witness
Mr. Yamaguchi lived until he was 93 years old. He performed work as a translator for American military forces and later resumed his career in engineering. During the 1950s he and his wife had two additional children. For many decades he spoke very little about his experiences. His daughter Toshiko provided an explanation during a peace meeting in 2011 — his family had prevented him from speaking in public. If a man who lived through two nuclear explosions appeared to be in good health, observers might decide that the weapons were not as harmful as described. In the view of his family, his physical state was too undamaged to be persuasive.
By the time he was in his eighties, he began to speak. He produced a book about his life and in 2006 delivered a speech at the United Nations. To ABC in 2009, he stated: "I have walked and crawled through the bottom of hell. I should be dead. But it was my fate to keep on living." In March 2009, sixty-four years after the events, the government of Japan gave him official recognition as a person who survived both explosions — the only individual to whom they granted that specific title. There are approximately 160 or more people known to have been at the sites of both detonations. On January 4, 2010, he died. In one of his final interviews, he stated that he hoped a third event of this kind would never happen. Due to a need for a stamp, he had returned to the city.