Wednesday, January 06, 2010

Some People Don't Have Any Luck

Tsutomu Yamaguchi was in Hiroshima on a business trip for his shipbuilding company on Aug. 6, 1945, when a U.S. B-29 dropped an atomic bomb on the city. He then returned to his hometown of Nagasaki, about 190 miles to the southwest, which suffered a second U.S. atomic bomb attack three days later. He passed away Jan. 4, 2010.

As people say, “if they didn’t have bad luck, they’d have no luck at all.” Yamaguchi was the only person to be certified by the Japanese government as having been in both cities when they were attacked, although other dual survivors have also been identified.

1945 he was 29 and working as a draftsman designing oil tankers for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. His three-month deployment to a shipyard in Hiroshima was due to end on the morning of August 6, when the American B29 bomber dropped an atomic bomb.

He and two colleagues staggered through the ruins where the dead and dying lay all around. At one collapsed bridge the three had to wade through a river, parting before them a floating carpet of corpses. They reached the station and boarded the train for Nagasaki. Reporting to work at the shipyard on August 9, his story of a single bomb destroying an entire city was met with incredulity.

“The director was angry. He said ‘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.”
--From Internet sites.

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