The following article is reproduced with permission from the author.
The original story from March 25th, 2009 can be found here:
http://timesonline.typepad.com/times_tokyo_weblog/2009/03/the-luckiest-or.html
"The Luckiest or Unluckiest Man in the World? Tsutomu Yamaguchi, double A-bomb victim"
By the Asia Editor for the Times Online, Richard Lloyd Parry.
[Kyodo
reported yesterday that Tsutomu Yamaguchi, one of the handful of people
to survive the atomic bombings of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, has
finally been recognised as such by the Nagasaki local government. Four
years ago, shortly before the 60th anniversary of the end of the war, I
interviewed Mr Yamaguchi, and two of his fellow double-hibakusha, over the course of several days. Here is the long piece which I wrote about them for the Times Magazine. See below a photograph of Mr Yamaguchi next to a replica of the "Fat Man", by an outstanding photographer, Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert, who has also blogged on our assignment here.]
Tsutomu Yamaguchi, Akira Iwanaga and Kuniyoshi Sato are either the
luckiest or the unluckiest men alive, and after three days in their
company and long hours of conversation, I still had no idea which. It
is sixty years since their monstrous ordeal and all three are well into
their ninth decade. Mr Sato, who is 86, uses a wheelchair after
injuring his back, and 89-year old Mr Yamaguchi is almost deaf in one
ear. But all of them exude the dignified vigour of elderly Japanese,
the world’s healthiest and longest living race. “I was a heavy smoker,”
Mr Yamaguchi told me during our first meeting, “but I gave up smoking
and drinking when I was 50. I didn’t expect to live to 80. And now I’m
well over 80.” The miracle is not that he is alive now, but that he
made it past the age of 29.
Mr Yamaguchi and his friends are freaks of history, victims of a
fate so callous and improbable that it almost raises a smile. In 1945,
they were working in Hiroshima where the world’s first atomic bomb
exploded 60 years ago this morning, on 6 August 1945. 140,000 people
died as a result of the explosion; by pure chance, Mr Yamaguchi, Mr
Sato and Mr Iwanaga, were spared. Stunned and injured, reeling from the
horrors around them, they left the city for the only place they could
have gone – their home town, Nagasaki, 180 miles to the west. There, on
9th August, the second atomic bomb exploded over their heads.
In a century of mass killing, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
marked the beginning of a new age. The end of the world was transformed
from an imaginative notion, the fancy of poets and prophets, into a
real and living possibility. Three men survived the beginning of the
end of the world, not once, but twice. Sixty years later, all three of
them are alive.
They still send one another New Year cards with news of friends and
family, but until I met up with Mr Yamaguchi and Mr Iwanaga in the
Nagasaki Peace Memorial Park, it was the first time they had seen one
another since 1969. “We sat down by the fountain of peace with young
Sato, and talked for a long time,” said Mr Yamaguchi. “That was more
than thirty years ago now. But we always have a mental bond, no matter
how much time passes.”
These days Nagasaki is famous in the west as a symbol of tragedy,
but long before 1945 it had established itself as one of the most
dynamic, cosmopolitan and romantic cities in Asia. For centuries,
Western innovations, western learning and western technology flowed
into Japan through Nagasaki’s beautiful and celebrated harbour,
surrounded on three sides by green mountains. Japan’s first gun, its
first telephone, its first metal type printing press and its first
pumpkins made their appearance in Nagasaki. Christianity was introduced
here in the 16th century before being brutally quashed by the shoguns
100 years later. And when Japan’s embarked on its long war, first
against China in the 1930s and then against the United States, Nagasaki
was a crucial military and industrial base.
It was a city dominated by one company, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries,
and it was there that Yamaguchi, Iwanaga and Sato worked as technical
draughtsmen designing oil tankers. The beginning of the war with the
United States was as big a surprise to ordinary Japanese as it was to
the US Navy in Pearl Harbour. But by the middle of 1942, the runaway
military successes of the first six months of the war went into a
grinding reverse, and the country was stricken by terrible shortages.
"I never thought Japan should start a war,” said Mr Yamaguchi. “It
seemed so sudden – I was amazed. Soon we were running out of iron,
steel and oil, but the tankers bringing in the oil were constantly
being sunk by submarines. If ten tankers went out, and one of them came
back, that was considered a success. At work, I could see the shortage
of materials and the loss of personnel, but we couldn’t keep up with
demand and quite soon thought that Japan couldn’t win.”
In May 1945, Mr Yamaguchi’s first child, a boy named Katsutoshi, was
born. “I thought about what I would do when we were defeated and the
enemy would invade this country,” he said. “I thought about what to do
with my wife and family when the enemy came. Rather than letting them
be killed I should do something, give them sleeping pills and kill
them, kill my wife and family. I was seriously considering such
things.” As Mr Yamaguchi was preoccupied with these appalling thoughts
came bad news. Along with Sato and Iwanaga, he was to be dispatched to
work in another shipyard of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries – in Hiroshima.
For a new father, the timing could not have been worse, but there
was no choice. From spring until summer, the three men worked long days
in the southern outskirts of Hiroshima on the waters of the Seto Inland
Sea. After three months the job was done and orders were given to
return to Nagasaki on 7th August 1945. The day before they rose early,
packed their bags, and set out from their lodgings to say goodbye to
their colleagues.
On the bus, Mr Yamaguchi realised that he had forgotten something
important – the personal name stamp which he needed to sign off on his
departure documents. While his two colleagues went ahead of him, Mr
Yamaguchi hurried back to the company dormitory, picked up the stamp,
jumped back on the bus and got off at the last stop. Then he began the
thirty minute walk to the Mitsubishi Shipyard.
We were sitting outside as Mr Yamaguchi described all of this, in
the garden of his daughter’s house on a beautiful hillside outside
Nagasaki. The hillside was covered with fruit trees; Mr Yamaguchi’s
daughter, Toshiko, brought bowls of sweet loquats. “I was walking
towards the shipyard,” said Mr Yamaguchi. “It was a flat, open spot
with potato fields on either side. It was very clear, a really fine
day, nothing unusual about it at all. I was in good spirits. As I was
walking along I heard the sound of a plane, just one. I looked up into
they sky and saw the B-29, and it dropped two parachutes. I was looking
up into the sky at them, and suddenly … it was like a flash of
magnesium, a great flash in the sky, and I was blown over.”
The American B-29 bomber ‘Enola Gay’ had flown from the Pacific
island of Tinian 1500 miles away. It had dropped a 13 kiloton uranium
atomic bomb, nicknamed ‘Little Boy’, which exploded 580 metres above
the centre of Hiroshima at thirty seconds after 8.15am.
“I didn’t know what had happened,” Mr Yamaguchi went on. “I think I
fainted for a while. 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. I saw my baby son, and I saw my wife and brothers –
they all came to my eyes in a flash. I thought I might have died, but
eventually the darkness cleared and I realised I was alive.’
“When the noise and the blast had subsided I saw a huge
mushroom-shaped pillar of fire rising up high into the sky. It was like
a tornado, although it didn’t move, but it rose and spread out
horizontally at the top. There was prismatic light, which was changing
in a complicated rhythm, like the patterns of a kaleidoscope. The first
thing I did was to check that I still had my legs and whether I could
move them. I thought, ‘If I stay here, I’ll die.’
“Two hundred yards ahead, there was a dugout bomb shelter, and when
I climbed in there were two young students already sitting there. They
said, ‘You’ve been badly cut, you’re seriously injured.’ And it was
then I realised I had a bad burn on half my face, and that my arms were
burned.”
After two hours in the shelter, Mr Yamaguchi set out again for the
shipyard. He walked past a small hill which lay between it and the city
centre. Anti-aircraft guns had been mounted there; the bodies of the
gunners lay sprawled and motionless. But the shelter of the hill had
saved the lives of Mr Iwanaga and Mr Sato and their colleagues in the
shipyard.
They had been inside the works office at the moment of the
explosion, saying their goodbyes. Glass and furniture had flown across
the room, but apart from a few cuts and bruises no one had been
seriously injured. They had gone out to look for Mr Yamaguchi, but
returned in despair, beaten back by the fires and the broken bridges.
“I was glad to see them, and they were glad to see me too,” he said.
“The three of us were together again, and we had survived.”
City-dwelling Japanese were well used to being bombed by this stage
in the war, but everyone immediately recognised that this was something
new. “We had no idea what kind of bomb it was, of course,” said Mr
Yamaguchi. “All we knew was that it had been just a single bomb, but it
had done all this.” The one thing that everyone remembered was that the
explosion had two distinct components. First came the soundless flash
of blinding magnesium light, and fractionally later the blast wave and
the roar. It was this observation that gave the bomb its earliest name
in Japanese, based on the onomatopoeic expressions for a flash and
boom: pika-don.
The three took a motor launch to try to find a way back in to the
city and to their lodgings. “From the boat we could see the city
burning,” said Mr Yamaguchi. “Every branch of the delta was burning.
The sky was dark, so you could clearly see these pillars of flame. I
thought that all of Hiroshima was finished.” But it was only after they
disembarked and began the walk back to their lodgings that they
understood what this new kind of bomb had done to people. These are the
scenes that every survivor of Hiroshima or Nagasaki remembers, the
images that crawl through their dreams and wake them up in the middle
of the night.
To Mr Yamaguchi, there seemed to be children everywhere, some
running, many limping along the side of the road. “They didn’t cry,” he
said. “I saw no tears at all. Their hair was burned, and they were
completely naked. I saw so many of these children. Behind them big
fires burned. Miyuki Bridge, next to our dormitory, was still standing,
but all over it there were burned people, children as well as adults,
some of them dead, some of them on the verge of death. They were the
ones who couldn’t walk any more, who had just lain down. None of them
spoke, none of them had the strength to say a word. It’s funny that
during that time, I didn’t hear human speech, or shouts, just the sound
of the city burning. Under the bridge there were many more bodies,
bobbing in the water like blocks of wood.”
After a sleepless night in an air raid shelter, they retrieved their
bags from the ruins of their dormitory and made for the west of the
city, where a single railway station was operating. They passed more
scenes of human agony: blinded people, people with their faces so
swollen it was impossible to tell if they were men or women, people
with their skins hanging off their bodies. “We saw a mother with a baby
on her back,” said Mr Iwanaga. “She looked as if she had lost her mind.
The child on her back was dead and I don’t know if she even realised.
There were some things I couldn’t look at – internal organs hanging
out, the tongue or the eyes hanging loose. If you have a normal set of
nerves it’s very difficult to look at something like that.”
They were corpses along every road and in all the rivers, as well as
the corpses of horses. At one downed bridge, the three men had to wade
through a river, parting before them a floating carpet of dead bodies.
They reached the station, and forced their way through the crowds which
were pressing to get on the train for the overnight journey to
Nagasaki. Mr Sato got separated from his two friends and it was he who
witnessed the final horror.
A young man sat opposite him in the carriage clasping on his knees
an awkward bundle wrapped in a cloth. An appalling smell issued from
the bundle; with every bump and lurch of the train, the young man
gripped it tightly. “I asked him what it was,” remembered Mr Sato, “and
he said, ‘I married a month ago, but my wife died yesterday. I want to
take her home to her parents.’” He lifted the cloth and showed Mr Sato
what lay beneath: it was an upturned helmet containing the severed head
of the young man’s wife.
At the distance of 60 years it seems incredible, a cosmic joke, that
anyone should be exposed to two atomic bombs, but at the time that was
exactly what Mr Yamaguchi and his friends expected. They had no way of
knowing that the United States possessed only two of the weapons, or
that Hiroshima was the only city to have been attacked with them. When
they got home all three men thought the same thing: that it could only
be a matter of time before the same thing happened in Nagasaki, and
that urgent preparations needed to be made.
Mr Sato and Mr Iwanaga went to their homes on the outskirts of the
city and set about removing the glass from their windows and deepening
their dug out air raid shelters. Mr Yamaguchi went straight to the
hospital where his burns were treated and bandaged – it is this prompt
treatment, he believes, which saved him from the appalling keloid scars
which disfigured other victims of the bomb. Other men might have used
exposure to an atomic bomb as an excuse to take a few days off work.
But the next day, as perhaps only a Japanese worker would, he reported
for work at the shipyard.
“I was covered in bandages,” he said. “People could only see my
eyes, lips and nose. Until I opened my mouth, my own mother didn’t
recognise me. I reported to the director who had sent me to Hiroshima
and he asked me what was going on there. I said that I didn’t know what
kind of bomb it was but that a single one had destroyed the entire
city. I told him that I had come back with Iwanaga, but that I failed
to come back with Sato, although I knew he was alive.
“Well, the director was angry. He reproached me for losing Sato. He
said: ‘A single bomb can’t destroy a whole city! You’ve obviously been
badly injured, and I think you’ve gone a little mad.’ At that moment,
outside the window, I saw another flash and the whole office,
everything in it, was blown over.
“We were both on the ground. The director was shouting, ‘Help me!
Help me!’ I realised at once what had happened, that it was the same
thing as in Hiroshima. But I was so angry with the director. I climbed
out of the window and got away because I had to help myself.”
A second B-29, ‘Bock’s Car’, had left Tinian that morning. It had
dropped a 25 kiloton plutonium bomb, known as ‘Fat Man’, which exploded
above the northern part of Nagasaki at 11.02am.
At that moment, Mr Iwanaga was dozing on a suburban train bound for
central Nagasaki. The glass on the side of the train facing the city
was blown in, but he escaped without injury.
Mr Sato was also in the shipyard, standing by the quayside. “People
were asking me what happened in Hiroshima, because they had heard
rumours,” he said, “I was just explaining when I saw the flash of
light. Instinctively I knew what was happening, so I jumped immediately
into the water.” He trod water for an hour, and escaped without a
scratch.
Mr Yamaguchi crawled home to his wife and baby, who had no more than
scratches and bruises. The blast had blown off his bandages, exposing
the raw burns. The hospital where he had been treated the day before
was destroyed; 70,000 people were dead or dying. Mr Yamaguchi curled up
in the shelter behind his damaged house, and lay there for days,
semi-conscious, in a high fever, hovering between life and death.
“I must have stayed there for a week,” he said. “I didn’t know if it
was night or day. Then one day, it was the 15th August, I realised that
people around me were crying. Some were crying, some were delighted.”
They were listening to the famous broadcast by Emperor Hirohito, the
first one ever made by a Japanese emperor, announcing Japan’s
surrender. “I had no feeling about it,” Mr Yamaguchi said. “I was
neither sorry nor glad. I was seriously ill with a fever, eating almost
nothing, hardly even drinking. I thought that I was about to cross to
the other side.”
* * *
For sixty years, soldiers, politicians and historians have argued
about the morality of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Did it bring an
end to the war, removing the need for a land invasion which would have
killed many more civilians and soldiers than the bomb itself? Or was it
a cynical test of a new weapon on an enemy which was already on the
verge of collapse? Whatever moral doubts exist about the bombing of
Hiroshima, they are redoubled in the case of Nagasaki.
In the three days since the first bomb, no word had come from Tokyo
suggesting imminent surrender. But American intelligence was fully
aware of the confusion which reigned in the Japanese High Command: the
question under debate was not whether, but how, to submit to the
inevitable. It knew too that, with the entry into the Pacific War of
the Soviet Union, Japan’s decline was irreversible. “Why did they have
to drop another bomb on Nagasaki?” Mr Yamaguchi asked me as we sat in
the fruit garden. “They could have made their point by dropping one
bomb. I think they were in a hurry to show their superiority. It would
have been one thing if they had used it on a battlefield. But they knew
that it would kill women, children, babies. How could they do that?”
The years after the war were hard ones for the three men from the
Mitsubishi shipyard. But all of them eventually won their share in
Japan’s astonishing post-war prosperity. Mr Iwanaga became a civil
servant in the Nagasaki City Office, and Mr Sato had a career in the
local government of nearby Amakusa island, where he still lives. Mr
Yamaguchi worked first for the US military occupation, then as a
teacher, and finally returned to Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. He is the
oldest of the three, and the most emotional and imaginative. Sato and
Iwanaga, practical engineers and bureaucrats, seemed to me to have
overcome the anguish of the atomic bombings. But in Tsutomu Yamaguchi,
I sense, it lives on undiminished.
"I write poems, songs of the atomic bomb,” he said, and he wept as
he spoke. “People often ask me to write new ones. When I’m writing a
poem like that, I have to transport myself back to when it happened,
and that’s tough for me. That’s tough. On those nights I dream of what
I saw. I dream of the dead lying on the ground. They get up from the
ground and they walk past me, one by one. This is the dream I have when
I write poems, when I remember the wasteland.”
I read one of Mr Yamaguchi’s tanka, a traditional Japanese stanza, which he wrote in 1969.
Thinking of myself
As a phoenix
I cling on until now.
But how painful they have been,
These twenty-four years past.
I asked Mr Yamaguchi if he felt optimistic about the future. He hesitated, then said: “I have hope for the future.”
Where did that hope come from? “I believe in love, in human beings,”
he said, and he was weeping again. “The reason that I hate the atomic
bomb is because of what it does to the dignity of human beings. Look at
the photographs of the aftermath of the atomic bombing, those dead
bodies in the photographs. When you forget the dignity of individual
human beings, that it is when you are heading towards the destruction
of the earth.”
What did it mean, I asked, to have lived through two atomic bombs?
“I think that it is a miracle,” he said. “But, having been granted this
miracle, it is my responsibility to pass on the truth to the people of
the world. For the past 60 years, atomic bomb survivors have declared
the horror of the atomic bomb, but I can see hardly any improvement in
the situation.”
Towards the end of our long conversation, Mr Yamaguchi wept
repeatedly. It was the week of the United Nations conference on
non-proliferation Treaty. The mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had
travelled to New York to make an appeal for disarmament on behalf of
the survivors of the atomic bomb. But the meeting had ended in failure,
and Mr Yamaguchi was taking it hard.
There was another reason for his sadness. His wife had lived in an
old people’s home for five years, and in March, Katsutoshi, the baby
son born amid such trepidation, had died too. “My son was born in
February 1945,” Mr Yamaguchi said. “He was exposed to the radiation of
the bomb when he was just six months old. He died this February 4th at
the age of 59. He had cancer. The son of 59 died, leaving the father of
89 behind. He was still a baby to me. The death of my son takes away my
will to live.” Mr Yamaguchi was consoling himself with a demanding
spiritual exercise. He was painting the images of Buddhas, representing
the 88 temples of a famous pilgrimage on the island of Shikoku. “I am
too old to visit those places physically,” he said. “But by painting in
their colours, I want to pray for the spirits of the people who died in
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and for my son.”
I heard from Mr Yamaguchi’s daughter the other day. He had worked
day and night to colour in the drawings of the Buddhas of the Shikoku
pilgrimage, she said, and had finished all 88 of them; afterwards he
fell into an exhausted depression. He seemed calmer these days, but
detached, and she understood the reason. It was as if he was preparing
to cross over to the other side.
For more articles by Richard Lloyd Parry, please visit his web log:
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