Friday, 11 July 2025

Special Guest Blogger: Tsutomu Yamaguchi

There are two types of people in this World, the glass half full and the glass half empty types and some may say that i was one of the most unluckiest men in history and others say i was the luckiest but i lived to be 93 but i almost checked out twice in 1945 and earned the label as the man who got nuked twice and survived.
August 6, 1945 and the war was winding down, the Japanese were negotiating an end to hostilities and i was a 29-year old engineer for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and was on a a business trip in Hiroshima which was deemed a safe place as it was a civilian city with no military significance so i was a surprised as anyone when the United States dropped the world’s first Atomic Bomb and incinerated the city.
I was about two miles away from the epicenter of the blast which killed 140,000 of my fellow citizens, but I was nevertheless temporarily blinded, left with my eardrum destroyed and horrific burns over much of the top half of my body.
The next day, i suffered more radiation exposure as i made my way to the city center in an effort to find a way to hightail it back home to the safety of home, home being Nagasaki.
Us Japanese are an industrious lot and i was back at work three days after the nuclear holocaust that nearly killed me. Then, while detailing the events of the prior few days to my boss, a familiar blinding light suddenly filled the room as a second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, killing another 100,000 people and devastating the city so thoroughly that, in the words of our mayor: 'Not even the sound of insects could be heard'.
I spent many years wrapped in bandages for my resulting skin wounds, and i went completely bald from the radiation and when i died of stomach cancer it was said that it stemmed from all the radiation I suffered but when you escape certain death twice when a quarter of a million of your citizens never, I  can't complain too much.

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