March 24, 2009
You think you've got bad luck? Meet Mr. Yamaguchi
Tsutomu Yamaguchi, 93, is the unluckiest man in the world. He's also the luckiest man in the world, too.
According to Donald Sensing, this fellow may be the unluckiest man in the world. In fact, Sensing says he may be the unluckiest guy in the history of the world.
TOKYO — A 93-year-old Japanese man has become the first person certified as a survivor of both U.S. atomic bombings at the end of World War II, officials said Tuesday.
Tsutomu Yamaguchi had already been a certified "hibakusha," or radiation survivor, of the Aug. 9, 1945, atomic bombing in Nagasaki, but has now been confirmed as surviving the attack on Hiroshima three days earlier as well, city officials said.
Yamaguchi was in Hiroshima on a business trip on Aug. 6, 1945, when a U.S. B-29 dropped an atomic bomb on the city. He suffered serious burns to his upper body and spent the night in the city. He then returned to his hometown of Nagasaki just in time for the second attack, city officials said.
The U.K.'s Guardian has more details on Yamaguchi's incredible luck.
According to a newspaper interview Yamaguchi gave on the 60th anniversary of the end of the Pacific war, he had spent the conflict designing oil tankers for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, a wartime zaibatsu, or conglomerate, whose shipyards dominated the Nagasaki skyline.
After a three-month stint at the firm's yards in Hiroshima, Yamaguchi and two colleagues, Akira Iwanaga and Kuniyoshi Sato, prepared to return to Nagasaki on 7 August, 1945. The day before, they woke early, collected their belongings and prepared for the train journey west.
On the way to the station they became separated after Yamaguchi realised he had left his personal seal in the office.
He remembers hearing the Enola Gay circling above, but thought nothing of it: Hiroshima was an important wartime industrial base, and the sound of circling planes had become a fact of life.
Within seconds he had been knocked to his feet by the force of the blast as "Little Boy" detonated 580 metres above central Hiroshima just after 8.15 am, announcing its arrival with a blinding flash followed by a deafening boom. As he stumbled to the train station the next day, Yamaguchi witnessed the destruction and carnage left by the bomber's 13-kiloton payload.
The following day, his burns swathed in bandages, Yamaguchi reported for work in Nagasaki, like Hiroshima an important industrial and military base.
At 11.02 on 9 August, as his boss reportedly questioned his sanity for believing that a single bomb could destroy a city the size of Hiroshima, a 25-kiloton plutonium bomb exploded above Nagasaki, throwing Yamaguchi to the ground.
He, his wife and baby son survived and spent the following week in a shelter near what was left of their home.
I mentioned his luck; while it's perhaps impossible to conceive of someone being more roughly treated by fate, it's also hard to label surviving not one but two atomic bombs as anything other than being lucky on a cosmic scale.
I agree with Sensing: Yamaguchi belongs in the Guinness Book of World Records, for having the worst luck in the world. But he deserves luckiest man, too, for having survived Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Posted by Mike Lief at March 24, 2009 09:47 PM
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