The Man Who Survived BOTH Atomic Bombs: Tsutomu Yamaguchi's Incredible Story

Kevin Lankes
Apr 28
7 min read

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/75FLh5Qrc7k

This has long been one of, if not my favorite story about the awfulness of humanity. It has it all. Everything that makes us who we are at our core. Plus, the crushing serendipitous fate of simply being in the wrong place at the very wrongest time. The atomic bombings are the most terrifying historical event that our species has passed through, and some got way closer than others. Like Tsutomu Yamaguchi, who’s the only recognized double bomb survivor from the nuclear blasts that put a sudden and jarring end to World War II. But the details are going to make you want to simultaneously laugh and cry. You’re going to want to stick around for this story.

On August 6th, 1945, 29-year-old Tsutomu Yamaguchi was just finishing up a three-month-long business trip in Hiroshima, Japan. Yamaguchi worked for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, which is a company with a long history tracing back to the introduction of naval technology to the Tokugawa Shogunate from the Dutch. During World War II, the company was responsible for making heavy machines and large engineering projects like ships, planes, and trains. Yamaguchi was a draftsman who designed oil tankers. And he was in Hiroshima for that long month working on designs for a brand new one.

On the morning of the 6th, he was walking to the train station with colleagues because the work was done and his trip was at an end. Yamaguchi realized he’d forgotten his ID back at the Mitsubishi plant, so he turned around and told his colleagues he’d catch up with them. It was around 8:15 am when he heard the Enola Gay careening toward the city center. He looked up in time to see the B-29 bomber drop a small object attached to parachutes. Of course, now we know this object to be the first ever atomic bomb, code-named Little Boy.

Now, this was the biggest war that anyone had ever seen and Yamaguchi was an engineer. He was in the midst of all of this and knew what to expect, or at least, he thought he did. It was one bomb, dropped on the city center, and there was really no reason to worry so much about that. Except that he barely had enough time to dive into a drainage ditch to avoid the shockwave, after what he described as “the lightning of a huge magnesium flare” which took up the visible sky in front of him. And even though he was smart enough and fast enough to take cover, the subsequent shockwave picked him up and twirled him around and dumped him in a nearby field. The blast ruptured his eardrums, made him temporarily blind, and caused severe burns on a significant portion of his upper body. All of this, even though he was 1.9 miles from the epicenter of the blast.

Eventually, Yamaguchi managed to crawl along to relative safety, making his way to an air raid shelter. Once there, he met up with the colleagues he was planning to leave with, and they all spent a restless night together. The next day the trio made it to the train station which was somehow still functioning, and they took the long, overnight trip home to the city where they lived, Nagasaki. When Yamaguchi walked in the door of his home, his family didn’t recognize him because he was so badly burned. Of course everyone immediately made him go to the doctor, because atomic blast. And the doctor was a childhood friend, who also didn’t recognize him, and then he wrapped Yamaguchi in so many bandages that when he got home again his mother said he looked like a ghost.

In maybe the absolute worst example of toxic work culture that there’s ever been, despite living through an unprecedented mass death event caused by the most terrifying and devastating weapon of war ever seen by human eyes, Yamaguchi showed up to work the next day. You always gotta be a team player and think of the shareholders, you know? He was a good salaryman, and of course, Japan is notorious for it’s completely nonexistent work-life balance, so much so that the government has launched initiatives to try to deal with it in recent months.

So Yamaguchi goes into the Mitsubishi office on the morning of August 9th, and reports on the three-month-business trip, and oh, by they way, a massive explosion destroyed the entire city of Hiroshima while I was there. But no one believes him! At around 11 in the morning, he’s in a meeting with a supervisor trying desperately to convince the man that what he’s saying is true, but it’s not working. His supervisor is telling him that he’s crazy, like there’s something seriously wrong with him. Yamaguchi comes to work all burned up and wrapped in bandages like a mummy, spouting nonsense about one single bomb annihilating a city? That’s just nuts. You’re mistaken, Yamaguchi, you saw something maybe, but you got it wrong somehow, and there were many other bombs you didn’t see because there’s no way a single bomb could do all this. There’s no thanks or reward for his loyalty after coming in to work right after surviving a nuclear explosion, because no one can wrap their heads around the fact that this really happened. And that’s exactly when it happened again. This was the moment the B-29 bomber Bockscar dropped Fat Man on Nagasaki.

Yamaguchi was standing with his boss next to the floor-to-ceiling windows in the meeting room, pleading with him about the blast and trying very hard to get the man to believe him, when the pair watched the sky light up once again. Yamaguchi had the terrifying thought that the bomb had followed him home from Hiroshima. And he knew exactly what was about to happen, so he dove to the floor and somehow convinced his boss to do the same as the mushroom cloud grew. The shockwave shattered the windows all around them as the pair of them cowered on the floor. Take that, middle management. You gotta believe your employees next time.

Incredibly, Yamaguchi survived his second atomic bomb blast, this time pretty much unscathed. Or, no more so than he already was. He was likely protected by the infrastructure of the building. And equally incredibly, he was once again exactly 1.9 miles away from the epicenter of the explosion.

Yamaguchi doesn’t wait to say I told you so. He gets himself out of there and rushes home to make sure his family is alright, only to find his house partially collapsed. He rummages around in the rubble, looking for any sign of them. Amazingly, and in another case of bizarre serendipity, they survived, but only because at the time of the explosion, they’d been so thoughtful as to go out and shop for burn cream for Yamaguchi. The only reason they survived the nuclear blast of Nagasaki was because Yamaguchi had been terribly burned in the blast at Hiroshima. If he hadn’t survived the first bomb, they wouldn’t have been out of the house and would have died in this one. This is like kind of a Donnie Darko moment.

The crazy thing here is that Yamaguchi lived a very long life after all this. He died in 2010 at the ripe old age of 93. It was stomach cancer that finally took him, and it likely had something to do with the radiation exposure. We know that he struggled with health problems throughout his life, and one of his children would go on the record to say that he was wrapped up in bandages for so much of their young life that they didn’t always know what he looked like. His family also struggled with health problems and his wife and son also died of cancer.

Even though there are an estimated 165 or so people who survived both bomb blasts, which is incredible on its own -- because we’re talking about an event that killed about 220,000 people and completely destroyed two cities -- Yamaguchis is the only one officially recognized by the Japanese government as a two-time survivor, or what’s called nijyuu hibakusha. Hibakusha is a term that roughly translates to bomb-affected person, and there are somewhere around 650,000 officially recognized hibakusha.

Yamaguchi stayed out of the spotlight for a long time, but as he grew older he discovered a sense of personal responsibility to speak out against the horrors of nuclear proliferation and atomic warfare. He began engaging in advocacy work and giving speeches in support of nuclear disarmament, one of which would come at the official recognition of his status as a double-bomb survivor. He generated a lot of press at the point, and used it cleverly to talk about the atrocities he witnessed and continue to push for peace and sensibility in the face of a growing apocalyptic threat. “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.” He also once told an interviewer that, “The reason I hate the atomic bomb is because of what it does to the dignity of human beings.” It’s just such a haunting sentiment.

And Yamaguchi’s personal outlet for the trauma that haunted him was poetry. Specifically a type of poetry called tanka which he’d been writing for most of his life. You can actually watch a video of Yamaguchi reciting his poetry that’s been uploaded to YouTube by a history professor, and I’ll link that below in the digeridoodles. Even if you don’t understand him, it’s a bit challenging to watch because of the visible pain that comes through.

Historian Chad Diehl from the University of Virginia lived with Yamaguchi for a period in his later years and in 2010, he self-published an English translation of Yamaguchi’s poetry. It’s called, horrifyingly, And the River Flowed as a Raft of Corpses. I’m going to let that be a personal call for you about whether or not you’d like to check that out. It’s on my list, just like the next video is also on my list, so please make sure to like and subscribe so that I can keep bringing you more of them. Links to the episode sources along with my patreon and website are down in the digeridoodles. Consider making a donation to the cause because I am a poor kid and would like to be financially stable someday. Until that day, let’s do some f*cking good about terrifying weapons of war, nuclear disarmament, and the incredibly challenging lessons from the past that just will not leave us alone. And I won’t leave you alone either. I’ll see you in the next one.