A blinding flash stunned Tsutomu Yamaguchi moments before the powerful blast tore apart the Japanese city of Nagasaki. Thousands were simply vaporised, leaving only silhouettes burned into walls. Many more would die of their injuries within weeks. The city was levelled. Many buildings disintegrated into dust.
It was 80 years ago this week that America dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and then Nagasaki, killing more than 200,000 people and finally forcing Japan to surrender, ending the Second World War.
But for Yamaguchi, the bomb dropped on Nagasaki was a nightmarish déjà-vu – having barely survived the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima three days earlier, which left him half-deaf, his skin blistered and burned.
It took another 64 years before Yamaguchi was officially recognised by the Japanese government as the nation’s sole “nijyuu hibakusha” – a survivor of both atomic bombs.
Yet he had not been alone in surviving both blasts: an estimated 160 others had the tragic misfortune of being in both cities when struck by the deadliest weapon ever unleashed.
Their stories offer a sober reminder of the terrible cost of war, and the suffering that endures long after hostilities have ceased.
“Having been granted this miracle, it is my responsibility to pass on the truth to the people of the world,” said Yamaguchi, who died from stomach cancer in 2010 aged 93.
Reflecting on a world still riven by conflicts, he lamented: “I can hardly see any improvement in the situation.”
The horror suffered by Yamaguchi and his fellow blast survivors is now to become a major movie from Hollywood mogul James Cameron, who directed blockbuster hits including Titanic, The Terminator and the Avatar franchise. The film will be based on Charles Pellegrino’s books, Ghosts of Hiroshima, published this week, and his 2015 book The Last Train From Hiroshima.
“The weapons currently deployed in the world today are from 1,000 to 10,000 times the power of the Hiroshima bomb and the Nagasaki bomb,” says Cameron, 70. “Get your mind around that for a second.”
Cameron expects his film will be so horrifying to watch that it may not be a box office draw like 2023’s Oscar-winning Oppenheimer, about the race to develop the atomic bomb.
“This may be a movie that I make that makes the least of any movie I’ve ever made, because I’m not going to be sparing, I’m not going to be circumspect,” he says. “I’m going to make it as intense as I can make it.”
This has been a decades-long passion project for Cameron, who visited Yamaguchi on his deathbed days before his passing in 2010.
“He was in the hospital,” says the director. “He was handing the baton of his personal history to us, so I have to do it. I can’t turn away from it. He is probably the most improbable statistic in history, having survived two nuclear bomb explosions at close range.”
Yamaguchi was a 29-year-old ship designer on a business trip to Hiroshima, walking through a shipyard at 8.15am on August 6, 1945, when he saw an American plane drop a small object hanging from a parachute.
Suddenly the sky blazed like “the lightning of a high magnesium flare”, he recalled. He was less than two miles from ground zero.
Yamaguchi dived for cover into a ditch, but the 15-kiloton uranium bomb’s shockwave hurled him across a field. He awoke beneath a nuclear pall: “Everything was dark, and I couldn’t see much.” Then he watched a fiery mushroom cloud rise above the city.
His face and forearms badly burned, and both eardrums ruptured, he stumbled toward the railway station with surviving co-workers, through a hellscape of burning ruins and charred corpses. Many had been vaporised, leaving only teeth scattered on the ground. Blood and bone were super-heated, reduced to gaseous clouds.
With bridges destroyed, Yamaguchi waded across a river awash with bloated bodies, and boarded a train packed with burn victims heading to his hometown 180 miles west in Nagasaki. Despite being so badly injured that his family couldn’t recognise him, Yamaguchi reported to his office on August 9 around 11am when the sky outside suddenly exploded in another incandescent blaze. The blast tore away his bandages, and immersed him in yet more cancer-causing radiation.
“I thought the mushroom cloud had followed me from Hiroshima,” he said.
Again, the 21-kiloton bomb fell less than two miles from him. Radiation sickness made his hair fall out and his arms turned gangrenous.
When Japanese Emperor Hirohito announced the nation’s surrender on August 15, Yamaguchi recalls: “I thought that I was about to cross to the other side.”
Though radiation sickness killed tens of thousands in the bombings’ aftermath, miraculously Yamaguchi survived, though plagued by health issues.
For 16 years, he was swathed in bandages and his wounds never completely healed. His wife Hisako and six-month-old son Katsutoshi also suffered life-long chronic health problems, as did his daughter born after the war.
But others also lived to tell of both bombings. Master kite-maker Shigeyoshi Morimoto lost 10 family members in the two attacks, yet survived mostly unscathed.
Visiting Hiroshima to discuss using kites to thwart US air attacks, he was half a mile from ground zero when the A-bomb struck Hiroshima. “The house collapsed and we were pinned beneath the fallen ceiling and roof,” he recalled in a 1956 interview.
He dug himself from the rubble to find every building flattened within a one-mile radius, and fire quickly engulfing the ruins.
After taking a train to his Nagasaki home, Morimoto was describing the blast to his wife when the sky exploded in white.
“It comes again!” he shouted, pushing his wife and son into the family’s air raid shelter, managing to close the trap door moments before the shock wave demolished their home. Masako Suga, aged 20, and her one-year-old son lived through both atomic attacks, as did Morimoto’s colleagues Tsuitaro Doi, Shinji Kinoshita and Masao Komatsu, along with Yamaguchi’s workmates Akira Iwanaga and Kuniyoshi Sato.
Yet few “nijyuu hibakusha” ever spoke of their shocking ordeals.
For decades a stigma was attached to atomic bomb survivors, shunned as second-class citizens in Japan because of the fatigue and illnesses they suffered due to radiation sickness.
“I felt so dishonoured that I had to experience the atomic bomb twice,” said accountant Kenshi Hirata. “It’s nothing to be boastful about.” Double bombing survivor Fukui Kinuyo, aged 14 when the bombs fell, recalled: “Some people even made fun of my horrible experiences.”
For years, her nightmares were populated by the victims she saw with melted faces, their skin sloughing off.
Rescued from her Hiroshima home’s wreckage, she fled to relatives in Nagasaki, arriving just hours before it too was devastated.
“I wondered why I had to go through such a terrifying thing twice,” said Kinuyo. “You can’t imagine what it’s like, walking on the bodies of people and horses. Words cannot describe the feeling under my feet.”
Belatedly, in 2009, Yamaguchi became the only person ever officially recognised by Japan as a twice-bombed survivor – just a year before his death.
“His focus was the future, abolishing nuclear weapons and campaigning for world peace,” said Chad Diehl, who translated Yamaguchi’s poems about the horrors.
James Cameron stresses the importance of never forgetting the horrors of the atomic bombings. “We can keep that flame alive, that memory,” he says.
“They’ve only died in vain if we forget what that was like, and we incur that a thousand-fold upon ourselves and future generations.”