Tsutomu Yamaguchi: The Man Who Survived Not One, But Two Atomic Bombs

A photo of Tsutomu Yamaguchi in his later years.

In the summer of 1945, World War II finally came to an end, at the surrendering of Japan in Tokyo Bay. Out of all the stories that have come out from this war, perhaps the most impressive story is that of Tsutomu Yamaguchi, who was a 29-year-old marine engineer from Nagasaki at the time of the bombings. He was employed by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, and his job was to design oil tankers. With a wife and kid, he tried his best to live a quiet life albeit the hardships of wartime Japan.

In the spring of 1945, he was sent on a three-month assignment to Hiroshima, and a few months later, as early August approached, his work was wrapping up. He eagerly looked forward to returning home to Hisako, his wife, as well as their infant son.

On the morning of August 6, 1945, the skies over Hiroshima were reported to be clear and bright. Yamaguchi, along with two of his colleagues, was walking to the shipyard. At 8:15 a.m., he heard the drone of an aircraft, and when he looked up, he saw a lone American B-29 bomber, which would turn out to be the Enola Gay. Moments later, it released a single parachute carrying “Little Boy,” the first ever atomic bomb to be used in warfare. The bomb blew up about 600 meters above the city with a yield equivalent to 15 kilotons of TNT.

During interviews, Yamaguchi said that all he saw was a flash of white light that permeated the sky, which was then followed by a very loud roar. He was approximately three kilometers (about 1.9 miles) from ground zero, so close that any person would have been thrown to the ground and severely burned. His eardrums ruptured, his skin peeled away, and he was left temporarily deaf and blind. When he regained consciousness, he saw collapsed buildings, fires, and streets filled with the cries of the injured and dying. Almost immediately after the bomb’s detonation, thousands died, and tens of thousands more would succumb in the coming days from burns, injuries, and radiation sickness. Given the circumstances, Yamaguchi was already very lucky to be alive.

In the rubble, Yamaguchi sought to find his colleagues. After doing so, they slept through the night in a bomb shelter. The next day, on August 7, he went to the train station. By chance, all of the trains were still running, and while bandaged and very much in pain, Yamaguchi boarded a train bound for home, arriving in Nagasaki on August 8.

Despite his current state, Yamaguchi felt constrained by his duties, forcing him to report to work on August 9, three days after the first bombing. At the Mitsubishi office, he told his fellow workers about what he had seen in Hiroshima. However, almost no one believed him. It’s even reported that his skeptical supervisor had asked, “How could one bomb destroy an entire city?” 

At precisely 11:02 a.m., as Yamaguchi recounted the blinding flash and mushroom cloud, the room lit up again. The American bomber Bockscar had dropped “Fat Man,” a more powerful plutonium bomb yielding about 21 kilotons. Yamaguchi was once more about three kilometers from the hypocenter. The explosion shattered windows and shot him across the room, but the surrounding hills contained much of the blast’s force as opposed to the flat terrain at Hiroshima. Though unhurt by the immediate explosion, his existing wounds worsened. He suffered high fever, constant vomiting, and his hair began falling out in clumps, which are all classic signs of acute radiation exposure.

Yamaguchi rushed home to find his wife and son had survived; they had been in a tunnel during the blast. His wife had ventured out for ointment and was exposed to black rain (radioactive fallout), but the family had survived nevertheless. In the shelter near their damaged home, they waited as Japan surrendered on August 15, ending the war.

For decades, Yamaguchi lived quietly. After the war, he worked as a translator for U.S. occupation forces, then as a teacher, before returning to engineering. In 1957, he was certified as a hibakusha for Nagasaki but mentioned nothing of Hiroshima, as he considered himself fortunate compared to those more gravely affected.

It wasn’t until his later years that Yamaguchi embraced his story. In his 80s, he wrote a memoir, Ikasareteiru Inochi (“A Life Well-Lived”), and a book of poetry capturing the trauma, including tanka verses about rivers of corpses. He appeared in the 2006 documentary Twice Survived: The Doubly Atomic Bombed of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, screened at the United Nations, where he pleaded for nuclear abolition.

Though at least 165 people experienced both bombings (known as nijū hibakusha), Yamaguchi was the only one officially recognized by the Japanese government for both, and he achieved his status in March 2009 after he applied. “My double radiation exposure is now an official government record,” he said. “It can tell the younger generation the horrifying history of the atomic bombings even after I die.” When he was 93, on January 4, 2010, Tsutomu Yamaguchi passed away from stomach cancer, which might have been caused by the radiation he had received decades earlier.