The Unluckiest Lucky Man in History

The Flash of a Thousand Suns

What most people do not realize is that the odds of surviving a nuclear blast at ground zero are virtually zero, yet one man lived through two of them in a span of three days. It is August 6, 1945. A young naval engineer named Tsutomu Yamaguchi is walking through Hiroshima when the sky erupts into a blinding white flash.

He is thrown into a potato patch by a shockwave of unimaginable force. His eardrums are ruptured, and the left side of his upper body is covered in severe burns. He just survived the deadliest weapon ever created by human hands.

But he has no idea that he is about to go home to Nagasaki and do it all over again.

Yamaguchi was on the final day of a three-month business trip for his employer. He had actually forgotten his travel stamp and turned back toward the shipyards to retrieve it. That tiny delay placed him less than two miles from the epicenter when the Enola Gay dropped its payload.

A Nightmarish Journey Home

Despite his horrific injuries, Yamaguchi dragged himself to an air raid shelter to spend the night. The city around him had been flattened into a smoldering wasteland.

The next morning, he navigated through a nightmare landscape of fires and melted metal to reach the train station. Miraculously, some trains were still running. He boarded a crowded carriage filled with other burned and traumatized survivors.

He was finally heading home. But his destination was Nagasaki.

When we read about strange geographical twists of fate, we might think of the story explaining Why Two Countries Missed By 54 Centimeters. Yamaguchi’s geographical timing, however, was far darker. He was traveling directly from one ground zero to another.

Lightning Strikes Twice

It is the morning of August 9. Yamaguchi is heavily bandaged and in immense pain, but he reports to his boss at the Nagasaki office. He tries to explain what he saw in Hiroshima.

His boss calls him crazy. He demands to know how one single bomb could possibly destroy an entire major city.

Just as his boss finishes that sentence, the room fills with that exact same blinding white light. The bomb known as “Fat Man” has just detonated over Nagasaki.

Yamaguchi is thrown to the ground a second time. His fresh bandages are blown right off his body. For the second time in 72 hours, he is caught within two miles of a nuclear explosion.

But wait - how does a human body absorb two atomic blasts and keep functioning? We often try to engineer human resilience, much like the concepts explored in Meet the Body Built for a 400km/h Crash. Yamaguchi’s body was entirely ordinary, yet he endured physical trauma that defies all medical logic.

The Double Survivor

The second blast exposed him to another massive dose of radiation. In the weeks that followed, he suffered from severe radiation sickness. His hair fell out, his wounds became infected, and he battled relentless fever.

Yet his body stubbornly refused to give up. He slowly recovered, eventually returning to work as an engineer and raising a family. He lived a relatively quiet life for decades.

It was not until his later years that he became a vocal advocate for nuclear disarmament. In 2009, the Japanese government officially recognized him as a “nijyuu hibakusha” - a double bomb survivor. He is the only person to ever receive this official distinction.

Tsutomu Yamaguchi lived to the age of 93, passing away in 2010. His DNA absorbed the wrath of two suns brought to Earth, and he simply kept on living.

If a single man can endure the absolute worst destruction humanity has ever unleashed, what does that say about our innate capacity to survive the impossible?