July 19, 2022 • 36 mins
On August 6th, 1945, Mitsubishi engineer Tsutomu Yamaguchi was finally heading home from a three month assignment in Hiroshima... until the United States dropped an atomic bomb over the city. Miraculously, he survived the bombing and made his way home to Nagasaki -- where he once again witnessed, and survived, an atomic bomb. Tune in to learn more about Tsutomu Yamaguchi's harrowing journey, as well as his life after surviving not one, but two separate atomic bombs.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Ye,
(00:27):
welcome back to the show Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as
always so much for tuning in. Let's hear it for
the man, the myth, the legend. Mr Max Williams. Who
there he is. There's our boy. There's our shining our
shining boy, saving grace of the show. We need to
get his face on a T shirt. We have heard
(00:49):
from you, folks, and that's what you demand. That's what
we're going to do. But first, uh, they called me
ben and no, this is one that this is one
we had some help with from our dear colleague, Mr
Gabe Louzier. Yeah, check him out on this day in
history class. And speaking of people whose faces belong on
a T shirt, this guy Tatomu Yamaguchi. He's the only
(01:15):
person to be officially recognized anyway, uh, to have survived
two nuclear bomb blasts. Two atomic bomb blasts. Kind of
a big deal. Yeah, you know, Uh, most people don't
survive the one. Uh, so Yamaguchi has beaten the odds
(01:37):
in terribly, terribly horrific times. You know, some two hundred
and sixty thousand people survived the atomic bomb attacks on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War Two. But this guy,
who was a Japanese engineer, didn't just survive the first attack,
(02:00):
he survived the second, and perhaps most amazingly, he lived
to tell the tale. Uh. This is a bit of
a heavy subject, but it's a story that the three
of us thought must be told. Want to give a
big thanks to Jay Hemmings over on War History Online
because nol his headline kind of hit one of the
(02:22):
questions that I had immediately. Lucky or unlucky? The man
who lived through two atomic bombs? Yeah, it's true. I
mean it is. It is sort of like a monkey's
paw kind of scenario. It's like, would you rather survive
to atomic blasts than live to you know, see everyone
you love perish in those atomic blasts and then be alone?
(02:44):
Or is it better to perish with them? Uh, it's
a good question. I mean I think if you asked him,
I think he probably considered himself lucky. But it is
it is a sad story, um, and one that that
starts back all the way in UH nine August six
to be specific, when Yamagachi was twenty nine years old
and he was an engineer. He was actually getting ready
(03:06):
to leave Hiroshima at the time. The writing was on
the wall bad things were coming. Yeah, he was pretty young.
He was twenty nine years old at the time, and
he was on a business trip along with ninety day
three month business trip for his company, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries,
(03:28):
and August six when the bomb drops. That was supposed
to be his very last day in the city, like
you said, and they were glad to go. He and
all his colleagues had spent the entire summer laboring over
designs for a new oil tanker, and he wasn't just
(03:50):
happy to be off work. He wanted to go back
home to his family because he and his wife had
just had a son who was an infant. So think
about that. You spend all summer like breaking your mind
and your heart over an oil tanker, and everybody listening,
you don't have to be a naval engineer to get this.
(04:11):
Deadlines are stressful, and we know that more than most.
So he he wanted to go see his kids, and
he was actually no from what I saw on the way,
Hemmings wrote, it is uh Yamaguchi literally almost got out
of the city. They were on the way to the
station when he realized, uh, he forgot some paperwork or
(04:34):
a travel stamp, basically hong ko. That's interesting. So is
this kind of like a passport. He's easy, he's traveling
within his own country. I'm interested in that. Why this
is a necessary thing. It's sort of like having a
driver's license or some you know, it's important. Clearly, it's
like everything. Oh man, there is a there's a great
retrospective on on these things called honko or incn um
(04:58):
forgive our Japanese we're not needed speakers. It's the it's
the signature stamp. You know, it's your personal seal. And
a lot of people who moved to Japan from abroad
and spend time there have a have a crash course
in learning these things, because ideally you don't just sign
stuff with like a pen. You have to have this stamp,
(05:20):
this seal. So it was important. It wasn't like him thinking, oh,
did I leave the oven on in the kitchen or something.
He would have probably needed that to sign anything official,
or he would have to go get a new one made.
It's interesting because I'm looking it up, but it's it
seems like it's interchangeable with the signature. But I guess
(05:41):
if you're signing on behalf of another entity or a company,
then that's what it gets tricky. Perhaps. Yeah, And I
really want one learning about this because these beautiful fast
carved from I guess bamboo or any other than it
could be another kind of softer would um and you
you know, keep in a really nice, bespoken case. And
(06:02):
it really is kind of like a personal you know,
item that many folks would carry around with them all
the time. Um. Probably a little less crucial now than
maybe it was then. UM, But I'd be really interested
in seeing some of these and collections, and also the
idea of like forging one, you know, it's sort of
the equivalent of having like a royal seal. I guess.
But I'm sorry, we're getting so caught up in this
(06:23):
that I just think it's fascinating. But by the way,
Mitsubishi Heavy Industries it is Mitsubishi, UM. It is the
Mitsubishi that we know today. It's a company that obviously
makes cars. It's the division of of the Mitsubishi group.
Rather um, Mitsubishi Motors is the division that makes cars.
Mitsubishi Heavy is the division that makes what it sounds
(06:46):
like heavy machinery and equipment, uh, like an oil tanker,
which is what he had been working on. So he
realizes he's left his travel stamp at his place of work,
and so he has to go back and get it.
Around a fifteen in the morning, he's walking to the
shipyard to get that travel stamp when he hears the
sound of an aircraft hovering overhead and he looks into
(07:08):
the sky and he sees a B twenty nine bomber,
the Aola Gay specifically, and he sees a small object
being dropped attached to a parachute, and then the sky
is on fire. He described it later as seeing um
the lightning quote the lightning of a huge magnesium flare.
(07:32):
At least he he likened it to that. And this
is a guy that's you know, worked with these kinds
of chemicals, and he, you know, he knows what he's
talking about. He had just enough time reaction time to
to hide himself, to to cover himself, duck and cover
in a ditch. Um and that's when he heard the
sound that this, uh, this object that had split the sky.
(07:54):
Make Yeah. So for people familiar with this tragedy, the
Enola Gay dropped the bomb called little Boy, and it's
amazing that Yam and Gucci was not just that he survived,
(08:16):
but it's amazing that he was able to see this
happen and the shock wave that occurred. Shout out to
our pal Rachel Lance, the number one expert on underwater
explosions and explosions in general. The shock wave that occurred
was so powerful it sucked him out of the ditch
(08:37):
that he was hiding in, and it spun him around
in the air and then threw him into a potato patch.
He would later learn that he was less than two
miles from ground zero, and we have his own words
from a interview he did with a British newspaper at
the Times. He said, I didn't know what had happened.
(08:58):
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, and uh, you know,
for for at least a little bit, he's pretty sure
he's dead, and he's thinking, okay, this is what death
(09:22):
is like. He thinks he's crossed the mortal veil, just
to reiterate two miles from where the bomb hit. I
mean that it's just unheard of. It seems like he
would have been a goner. So for him to believe,
you know, to believe that he had, you know, obviously,
it's like it's a country with very deeply held religious
beliefs as well, so I could totally understand that happening. Uh.
(09:43):
And you mentioned the sound being utterly cinematic. Um he
he says to him, he says in an interview at
the Times, as he said, eventually the darkness cleared and
I realized I was alive. When the noise and the
blasts subsided, I saw a huge mushroom shaped pillar of
fire rising up high into the guy. It was like
a tornado, although it didn't move, but it rose and
spread out horizontally. At the top there was prismatic light
(10:07):
which was changing in a complicated rhythm, like the patterns
of a kaleidoscope. What a wonderful recollection that is. And
you can find more about that and and all that's
interesting article by John Kurosky. I just think that's a
very obviously horrific scene. That he's describing, but he describes
it with almost like a elegance, you know, he's I mean,
(10:30):
he's had luckily the time to think about this, and
this is one of the most horrible impactful moments of
his life and in the history of Japan. The sun
is blotted out. We said it was about a fifteen
in the morning. The sun is gone because of all
the dust and debris. There are pillars of falling ash.
(10:52):
Like you said, he physically sees the mushroom cloud. He's
just two miles away from debtonation. He is temporarily blinded,
thankfully it's temporary. The blast blew out both of his
ear drums. The left side of this body, there is
a question that I had had originally. The left side
of his body is charred, and he is like at
(11:15):
this point to be clear, if he had just laid
down from shock, he would have died almost certainly. Instead,
this man is able to crawl despite his grievous wounds.
He's able to crawl to a bomb shelter and someone
is able to assist him, and he gets medical assistance.
And then he finds out that get this, his co
(11:38):
workers that were supposed to leave the city also survived
Kuniyoshi Sato and Akira Iwanaka. They stayed in an air
raid shelter overnight as well, and they said, okay, guys,
I think we can all agree we need to get
out of town. We need to leave. We don't need
to have a meeting about it. It's just time to go.
(12:01):
So they get ready to go to Nagasaki. So they
make their way to Nagasaki. But it's not a sure thing,
right They somehow they heard. You know, if you've ever
been in an emergency situation, you know that rumors take
out a life of their own. And so these guys heard,
they overheard people saying the trains were somehow still running.
(12:25):
So they said, okay, we've got to make it to
the train station. And um, when they emerge from that shelter, man,
I cannot imagine what greeted them. Just absolute havoc, chaos,
the walking dead. You know. Um, if you are of
strong constitution, I highly recommend a couple of films um,
(12:48):
both animated Japanese films, The Grave of Fireflies, which is
beautiful and heartbreaking. But then there is another one called
Barefoot jen Um from three and it is this exact
uh scenario that has depicted of the B twenty nine
um dropping. Uh, this this bomb and it shows the fallouse.
(13:13):
I'm watching it right now. It is horrific. It's like
you know, uh, people's skin melting off and teeth falling
out of their heads and eyeballs liquefying and just being
reduced to just pulsating, you know, ash and gore. I mean,
it's really one of the most horrific things I've ever
seen in an animated film. Um. So to see this
(13:35):
and have the perspective of how just two miles away
this man was spared uh and he still received these
really terrible burns on half his body. M h. And
this journey through a destroyed city is something you cannot
really put into words. It's experiential, right, it's phenomenal logical.
(14:00):
You have to go through that experience yourself to fully
understand it. There are cadavers, there are corpses that have
physically melted, and they're everywhere. Buildings are shattered, a lot
of the bridges are twisted. Uh. They get to a
river crossing and Yamaguchi has to swim through a layer
(14:23):
of corpses to reach this station. And when he gets
to the station, it turns out the train is working.
It's filled with people who have narrowly survived the explosion
with terrible, terrible injuries, both mental and of course physical.
But you'll be happy to know, ridiculous historians, he does
(14:47):
make it home to reunite with his wife and their
infant child. And if we fast forward sixteen hours after
the detonation of Little Boy, you see that President Harry
Truman gives a speech that reveals the atomic bomb to
(15:07):
the rest of the world for the first time. Of course,
people like yeah mcgucci are already very well aware that
something catastrophic has occurred, but they didn't know exactly what happened,
what this explosion was. And that's what Truman says. It
is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe.
(15:29):
And in his speech he rationalizes the attack on Japan.
Now we know the flight that Theola Gate took, we
know about the thousands and thousands who died immediately, and
then the toll, the death toll continues, right because people
(15:49):
are dying of other related injuries, tens of thousands of
them for weeks after this. And this is where this
is the same speech where Truman's says, if Japan doesn't surrender,
it can expect a reign of ruin from the air,
the like of which has never been seen on this earth.
It's a war against civilians At that point, I mean, really,
(16:12):
how do we reconcile this in our history? Like it's
just utter terrorism? And I know you know that we're
you know, rock in a hard place, but we've never
had to use this again and resoorts using it again,
and now it's just this whole like game of like
kind of standoff, you know with the folks that have
nuclear powers. But is this something you've ever thought about? Ben, Like,
(16:33):
is are we do as a country? Do we justify
this act? Or is it something we look back on
and in shame. You know, it's a complex topic in
that regard, and you will hear various different answers depending
on people's perspectives. Right about about so many events in
(16:55):
World War two, you know, uh shinzo Abe, the former
prime min star of Japan who was recently assassinated, refused
to apologize for any of Japan's actions in World War
Two from what I understand, But yeah, you know, we
have to keep in mind that I feel like I
have to say this more and more often these days.
(17:15):
When elephants wage war, it's the grass that suffers. So
these are questions that Yamaguchi isn't quite answering at this point, right.
He's just trying to survive, and there is amid all
this horror, I quld you not man. Something that made
(17:36):
me laugh, and we'll get to it in a second.
Here's what happens. He's back in Nagasaki. It's August eight now.
He goes to the hospital and the doctor who is
treating Yamaguchi is an old school chum of his. But
the burns of Yamaguchi endured are so severe that at
first his old friend doesn't recognize him. Neither does his family.
(17:59):
His mom calls him a ghost. When he gets back home,
he's on the verge of collapse. Here's here's the part
that made me laugh a little bit. The next morning,
August nine, still wrapped up in bandages, Yamaguchi gets up
and goes to work. He goes to Mitsubishi's Nagasaki office. Yeah,
(18:21):
that's a pretty serious work ethic there. But I would
say this is let's just consider this a snow day, right, Yeah,
like civilization is under attack. Yeah, yeah, it's at the
very least on pause around eleven am. He he wasn't
the only one, uh, he was in a meeting. They
were having meetings with the director of the company who
(18:43):
wanted a full report on Hiroshima from from the guy
with burns over you know, of his body, um, and
he discussed the events that he had witnessed on on
the sixth, everything from the blinding light to the sound
he His superiors actually were incredulous. They thought that he
(19:04):
was you know, pulling their leg or that he was
in some way, you know, exaggerating because this kind of
the power of this kind of weapon was not really
known yet. They wanted to know how this was possible
because this was based on any artillery or or you know,
armament that they were aware of. This is not something
that exists. Yeah, exactly. It sounds pretty crazy, right, And
(19:27):
if you look at it from the perspective of his employers,
it is understandable that they could find this hard to
believe because he was clearly heavily injured, so he might
not have maybe the most accurate recollection of the disaster
that occurred. And he's telling his employers. He's saying, look,
(19:51):
I'm not crazy. A bomb dropped and it destroyed the
entire city. I hope, he said, all so I showed
up to work, You're welcome, but why are you grilling me?
Get off my back? And the thing is, will never
know if he was about to say that while he
(20:11):
was trying to explain himself, because then, Noel, there was
another explosion. Yeah, there was, Um, you know, you probably
could have seen that coming. They are in Nagasaki at
this point. Uh. That was the side of the second
(20:33):
atomic bomb that was dropped, called fat Man, and this
one was worse. It was more powerful. That's why it
was the fat Man. The other one was a little boy.
He literally saw the city in front of him out
the window of the view of his office just implode,
last shattered instantly, um, sending just all kinds of shards
(20:54):
of you know, deadly broken glass shooting through the room. Again.
Just you can look up the scene if you're interested.
Maybe I don't want to watch the whole movie, but
this movie Barefoot gin Um. If you just type in
Barefoot gen g and nuclear bomb scene, it depicts all
of this stuff that we're describing and just the most
horrific detail. And there's a particular part where it shows
glass windows shattering, and he's just like almost as if
(21:16):
they're like being driven by some sort of like telepathy,
just these shards of glass flying and just you know,
skewering people. I mean, this was very, very real, um.
And sometimes seeing these kinds of things in a cartoon
just makes them even more real. Weirdly, I don't know
why that is, but it's I found that to be
the case. Um. Anyway, So he Yeah, if his bosses
(21:37):
didn't believe him before, as sure as I'll believe him now. Huh. Yeah,
and can you imagine stuff Frommagucci's perspective. In a later
interview with The Independent, he tells them that he sincerely
thought the mushroom Cloud had somehow followed him from Hiroshima,
and yeah, and you can't blame him. And like you said, man,
(21:58):
this second um is even more powerful and luckily, like
so next question is how does he survive this one? Luckily?
The landscape, the topography of the city, it's very hilly, right,
and there was a reinforced stairwell that sort of muffled
the blast inside the office. But his bandages were literally
(22:22):
blown off. He got hit by another surge of radiation.
He had yet again been within two miles of a
nuclear explosion, so he runs from the Midsubishi building. He
is again very very heavily injured, but and this is
(22:43):
something very understandable, his first goal is to find his
family to see if they are alive. He gets to
his neighborhood, noal. He gets to his house and he
sees that part of it has been destroyed in the blast.
But amaze seeingly enough, his wife and his infant son
(23:04):
are okay. They have cuts and bruises, but not like
not injuries that would require hospitalization because they were hiding
in a tunnel. Yeah, I mean, he really just cut.
It doesn't feel like luck at this point, because it
wasn't even something that anybody could have been prepared for
or known necessarily what to do, you know, to make
(23:27):
sure but you didn't get more grievously injured, and you know,
And I was reading some some comments on a message
board about this, and somebody pointed out very grimly that
how messed up is that the people that were closest
to the blast who got vaporized for the lucky ones.
That's something people often speculate about the event of nuclear
(23:50):
war or nuclear exchanges. If you are in a large city,
do you want to live through the initial blast. It's
a heavy question, but it's um It's an important question,
and you'll see why when we examine what happens to Yamaguchi.
And the reason his wife is in the tunnel by
(24:10):
the way, with their son is because she had been
out trying to find burn ointment for her husband, so
she wasn't in the house when it was destroyed. That's
how that's how they ended up hiding in a tunnel.
So you could say, as they mentioned on History dot Com,
that if Yamaguchi hadn't been injured at Hiroshima, his entire
(24:30):
family might have died that day at Nagasaki. Yeah, so
they live in a bomb shelter near what used to
be their house. As Japan surrenders, and then Yamaguchi, along
with so many other people in Japan, learns what happens
when you are exposed to an atomic bomb. And to
(24:52):
that quote you mentioned the message board, this is why
some people say in theory that they would prefer to
be vaporized, and he was, of course, was hit twice
with this radiation. His hair fell out, you know, those
burns that we talked about, started to get infected. He
was vomiting constantly. Um, you know, it was grievously ill.
(25:14):
He described hearing about the surrender of Japan's Emperor Hirohito,
and he said he was completely ambivalent about it because
of his condition. He says, quote, 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 over to the other side. But little
by little he he got better. Didn't even Yeah, he did.
(25:37):
And this is another stroke of great fortune, because many
victims of radiation exposure did not recover, and they would
have injuries that haunted them for the rest of their lives,
or they would die as a result of the radiation.
He went on. Yamaguchi, that is to live surprisingly relatively
(25:59):
nor old life. He was a translator for the US
Armed Forces during their occupation of Japan. He taught school
for a while, and then eventually he gets back into engineering.
For you guessed if folks Mitsubishi. He goes on to
have two more kids in the nineteen fifties. Uh, one
big change in his life. He does take up writing poetry,
(26:22):
but it isn't until many decades later, in the two thousands,
that he ever speaks publicly about his experience. Yeah, that's right,
and I mean we're obviously so glad that he did.
It's it's a it's a powerful story. I mean, you know,
we always talk about what qualifies a historical tail as
being ridiculous, and I think we could probably both agree,
(26:44):
or all three of us could agree that surviving or
just being unlucky enough to be present for two of
histories most brutal and deadly attacks, only to be able
to survive. I think that's ridiculous in and of itself.
And then it's just kind of like it almost is
too too much to believe, you know, it's almost too
(27:07):
insane to believe this could possibly happen, that one person
could be that unlucky but also that lucky. Yeah. Yeah,
going back to that headline really caught me. Later, his
daughter Toshiko points out something that I speak I think
speaks to his character, she says afterwards, meaning after his recovery,
he was fine. We hardly noticed he was a survivor
(27:29):
or what's called a hippop kusha. He was so healthy.
She says that he thought participating in anti bomb protest
or advocating for nuclear disarmament would have been unfair to
people who were really sick. So he had a conscience
about it. You know, he didn't want to be I think,
a performative face of a cause. But like so many people,
(27:56):
so many survivors of the atomic bombs, Suto Yamaguchi ultimately,
along with his family, suffered the long term effects of
radiation exposure. And this is the stuff that gets people
many many years later, both his son and his wife
eventually passed away due to cancer from from the exposure. Yeah,
(28:20):
I mean, and then you know, it's a long game
for a lot of these folks, as we know from
I mean honestly largely on the stuff they don't want
you to know. We talk about corporations that you know,
poison communities with toxic chemicals and um, you know, people's
proximity near nuclear waste dump sites and how that stuff
(28:41):
can leach into the soil and maybe you don't get
sick right away, but it it it becomes this legacy
of of death and illness and and just you know,
reduction of quality of life, and you know, you hear
about class action lawsuits and things like that. Are all
these companies and sometimes that helps and helps pay for things,
but ultimately you're never gonna get your life back. But
(29:02):
it's not like you can sue the United States for
you know, pain and suffering. When it was like, you know,
an active, hot war, right, But best I thought I
was that I was getting out earlier. Then it's like,
at what point does something become a war crime? Like
isn't this overkill? And you think it's not against a
(29:22):
military basis against the Affilian population. That's like where I
think about it too. It's like yeah, I don't know, yeah,
And it's it's a question that people wrestle with in
in the In the time, dropping the atomic bomb was
not seen as a war crime, but it was seen
(29:43):
as a means to an end. The idea was at
least two American military minds that they had a bomb
that could in the war. They had this technology and
if they didn't drop it, they would be traveled, they
would be essentially do mean their American soldiers to die?
So it was a greater good argument from their perspective
(30:06):
but as you know, again from stuff they don't want
you to know, check out our book coming out October
eleven wherever you find books. Um As as you know,
that greater Good argument is one heck of a slippery slope,
and it's a very very dangerous one. And just just
to add, I just I was just googling this as
we were talking about, and there's a really great um
(30:27):
piece on NPR that came out on the seventy five
anniversary of the bombings um from August six, and it
interviews quite a few legal scholars who say today this
absolutely would have been viewed as a war crime. Yes, yeah,
I mean I remember hearing the number of like they
they asked me it would take like seven hundred and
(30:48):
fifty thousand Americans who actually capture Japan. That was the
number that they had flown and floated around a lot,
and they expected millions of deaths of Japanese. But to
your point that that's a really slivery slope saying like, well,
we're actually saving Japanese lives by killing all these Japanese immediately,
(31:10):
like instantly with the nuclear bombs. So it's like it's yeah,
it just doesn't hold up you know, and this as
as Yamaguchi ages, he begins to publicly speak out against
nuclear weapons in general. He writes a memoir he corresponds
(31:31):
with President Barack Obama about this. He appears in a
documentary that is screened at the United Nations in two
thousand and six. He is one of around a hundred
and sixty five survivors who are thought to have survived
both the bombings, both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But Yamaguchi is
(31:53):
distinct because he is the only person who is recognized
by the Japanese government as having survived I've both attacks.
And he only got that recognition, by the way, because
he repeatedly wrote in and asked for it. Fascinating stuff.
And you can find the pictures of this man from
(32:13):
you know, not terribly long ago. He did. He did
pass away in two thousand nine, but not visibly scarred
or mutilated in any ways as a cane. But it
seems like he lived a very full life, you know,
past this tragic event. And obviously, you know, this is
the kind of PTSD that doesn't just like up and disappear.
But you know, I think it's I think he maybe
(32:35):
felt strongly about being recognized as that, not for you know,
some sort of glory, but just so he could talk
to people about it, describe it, yes, living history, yes,
the testimony to the horrors of war, but also the
enduring power of the human spirit, which I know otherwise
(32:55):
might sound a little pretentious or something, but this, this
is a true story. And you know when he passes
away unfortunately due to stomach cancer at the age of ninete,
what I think we can take away from this tale
is that history is always closer than you think. Two
thousand nine was not very long ago at all, and
(33:20):
with that we have to remember that history, the good
and the bad, the joy and the terror, it doesn't
exist in some dusty tone. It's not just a footnote
in a book in the library. It's alive. It's real,
and we forget it at our peril. Absolutely point well made,
(33:41):
and if you want to hear more, you know from
Yamaguchi he actually was a pretty extensive poet. He didn't
speak a ton about the bombings to even his own
family until late in life, but he created uh tanka,
which is a type of poet tree form like a haikuba,
(34:02):
but but but different. Similar that it has a pattern
of of alternating pattern of a number of syllables, so
it is a thirty one syllable poem in the pattern
of five seven five seven seven. Um. I was not
aware of this format, but you can't actually read some
of these that he wrote that he used as a
as a way of expressing some of these memories and
(34:24):
feelings surrounding it. So, um, that's something that you can
look up and maybe get a glimpse a little more
specifically into into this guy's this guy's mind. That's a
beautiful way to in this story. You know, thank you,
thank you for pointing that out. This is only one
story of people who have narrowly survived these tremendous disasters,
(34:45):
and unfortunately, there may be more stories like this in
the future. So this was a little bit of a
heavy wooden but again we believe it is an important
story to tell. History is closer than you think, and
our next episode is closer than you think. No, what
are we doing for our next episode? You know, Ben,
(35:06):
I'm glad you asked for our next episode. We actually
have a really cool partnership with twenty three and me,
the company that you know lets you take your DNA
test and find out all kinds of crazy stuff about
your lineage. And we both took the test and were
I think both uh surprised, pleasantly surprised at how far
these things have come, but we've been both taking them
(35:27):
in the past as well. Lots of cool information about
our lineage that we discussed, but also we just discussed
the history, uh and kind of controversy surrounding the discovery
of DNA itself. Yeah, I feel like Stefan on the
Old S and L Sketch. You know, this episode has everything.
(35:47):
We're not going to do the whole bit. We don't
want to spoil it, but we do hope you tune
in because I think we all had a fascinating time,
even more fascinating than we thought it would be. At
the offset and thanks as always to our super producer,
Mr Max Williams. Thanks of course to Gay Bluesier, our
(36:08):
little research associate. It's all grown up, no he is.
Check out his amazing daily podcast This Day in History Class.
Thanks of course to Alex Williams who can post our track.
Christopher Roscio is here in spirit, Eves Jeff Coates hat
in the world doing amazing things. I gotta thank Max again,
give him another wou love that guy. And thanks to
you Ben for me and a friend travel down the
(36:30):
road and back again. If you're a pal and a Confidanteal,
thank you as well, my friend. We'll see you next time. Folks.
For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the I
Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Ye,
(00:27):
welcome back to the show Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as
always so much for tuning in. Let's hear it for
the man, the myth, the legend. Mr Max Williams. Who
there he is. There's our boy. There's our shining our
shining boy, saving grace of the show. We need to
get his face on a T shirt. We have heard
(00:49):
from you, folks, and that's what you demand. That's what
we're going to do. But first, uh, they called me
ben and no, this is one that this is one
we had some help with from our dear colleague, Mr
Gabe Louzier. Yeah, check him out on this day in
history class. And speaking of people whose faces belong on
a T shirt, this guy Tatomu Yamaguchi. He's the only
(01:15):
person to be officially recognized anyway, uh, to have survived
two nuclear bomb blasts. Two atomic bomb blasts. Kind of
a big deal. Yeah, you know, Uh, most people don't
survive the one. Uh, so Yamaguchi has beaten the odds
(01:37):
in terribly, terribly horrific times. You know, some two hundred
and sixty thousand people survived the atomic bomb attacks on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War Two. But this guy,
who was a Japanese engineer, didn't just survive the first attack,
(02:00):
he survived the second, and perhaps most amazingly, he lived
to tell the tale. Uh. This is a bit of
a heavy subject, but it's a story that the three
of us thought must be told. Want to give a
big thanks to Jay Hemmings over on War History Online
because nol his headline kind of hit one of the
(02:22):
questions that I had immediately. Lucky or unlucky? The man
who lived through two atomic bombs? Yeah, it's true. I
mean it is. It is sort of like a monkey's
paw kind of scenario. It's like, would you rather survive
to atomic blasts than live to you know, see everyone
you love perish in those atomic blasts and then be alone?
(02:44):
Or is it better to perish with them? Uh, it's
a good question. I mean I think if you asked him,
I think he probably considered himself lucky. But it is
it is a sad story, um, and one that that
starts back all the way in UH nine August six
to be specific, when Yamagachi was twenty nine years old
and he was an engineer. He was actually getting ready
(03:06):
to leave Hiroshima at the time. The writing was on
the wall bad things were coming. Yeah, he was pretty young.
He was twenty nine years old at the time, and
he was on a business trip along with ninety day
three month business trip for his company, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries,
(03:28):
and August six when the bomb drops. That was supposed
to be his very last day in the city, like
you said, and they were glad to go. He and
all his colleagues had spent the entire summer laboring over
designs for a new oil tanker, and he wasn't just
(03:50):
happy to be off work. He wanted to go back
home to his family because he and his wife had
just had a son who was an infant. So think
about that. You spend all summer like breaking your mind
and your heart over an oil tanker, and everybody listening,
you don't have to be a naval engineer to get this.
(04:11):
Deadlines are stressful, and we know that more than most.
So he he wanted to go see his kids, and
he was actually no from what I saw on the way,
Hemmings wrote, it is uh Yamaguchi literally almost got out
of the city. They were on the way to the
station when he realized, uh, he forgot some paperwork or
(04:34):
a travel stamp, basically hong ko. That's interesting. So is
this kind of like a passport. He's easy, he's traveling
within his own country. I'm interested in that. Why this
is a necessary thing. It's sort of like having a
driver's license or some you know, it's important. Clearly, it's
like everything. Oh man, there is a there's a great
retrospective on on these things called honko or incn um
(04:58):
forgive our Japanese we're not needed speakers. It's the it's
the signature stamp. You know, it's your personal seal. And
a lot of people who moved to Japan from abroad
and spend time there have a have a crash course
in learning these things, because ideally you don't just sign
stuff with like a pen. You have to have this stamp,
(05:20):
this seal. So it was important. It wasn't like him thinking, oh,
did I leave the oven on in the kitchen or something.
He would have probably needed that to sign anything official,
or he would have to go get a new one made.
It's interesting because I'm looking it up, but it's it
seems like it's interchangeable with the signature. But I guess
(05:41):
if you're signing on behalf of another entity or a company,
then that's what it gets tricky. Perhaps. Yeah, And I
really want one learning about this because these beautiful fast
carved from I guess bamboo or any other than it
could be another kind of softer would um and you
you know, keep in a really nice, bespoken case. And
(06:02):
it really is kind of like a personal you know,
item that many folks would carry around with them all
the time. Um. Probably a little less crucial now than
maybe it was then. UM, But I'd be really interested
in seeing some of these and collections, and also the
idea of like forging one, you know, it's sort of
the equivalent of having like a royal seal. I guess.
But I'm sorry, we're getting so caught up in this
(06:23):
that I just think it's fascinating. But by the way,
Mitsubishi Heavy Industries it is Mitsubishi, UM. It is the
Mitsubishi that we know today. It's a company that obviously
makes cars. It's the division of of the Mitsubishi group.
Rather um, Mitsubishi Motors is the division that makes cars.
Mitsubishi Heavy is the division that makes what it sounds
(06:46):
like heavy machinery and equipment, uh, like an oil tanker,
which is what he had been working on. So he
realizes he's left his travel stamp at his place of work,
and so he has to go back and get it.
Around a fifteen in the morning, he's walking to the
shipyard to get that travel stamp when he hears the
sound of an aircraft hovering overhead and he looks into
(07:08):
the sky and he sees a B twenty nine bomber,
the Aola Gay specifically, and he sees a small object
being dropped attached to a parachute, and then the sky
is on fire. He described it later as seeing um
the lightning quote the lightning of a huge magnesium flare.
(07:32):
At least he he likened it to that. And this
is a guy that's you know, worked with these kinds
of chemicals, and he, you know, he knows what he's
talking about. He had just enough time reaction time to
to hide himself, to to cover himself, duck and cover
in a ditch. Um and that's when he heard the
sound that this, uh, this object that had split the sky.
(07:54):
Make Yeah. So for people familiar with this tragedy, the
Enola Gay dropped the bomb called little Boy, and it's
amazing that Yam and Gucci was not just that he survived,
(08:16):
but it's amazing that he was able to see this
happen and the shock wave that occurred. Shout out to
our pal Rachel Lance, the number one expert on underwater
explosions and explosions in general. The shock wave that occurred
was so powerful it sucked him out of the ditch
(08:37):
that he was hiding in, and it spun him around
in the air and then threw him into a potato patch.
He would later learn that he was less than two
miles from ground zero, and we have his own words
from a interview he did with a British newspaper at
the Times. He said, I didn't know what had happened.
(08:58):
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, and uh, you know,
for for at least a little bit, he's pretty sure
he's dead, and he's thinking, okay, this is what death
(09:22):
is like. He thinks he's crossed the mortal veil, just
to reiterate two miles from where the bomb hit. I
mean that it's just unheard of. It seems like he
would have been a goner. So for him to believe,
you know, to believe that he had, you know, obviously,
it's like it's a country with very deeply held religious
beliefs as well, so I could totally understand that happening. Uh.
(09:43):
And you mentioned the sound being utterly cinematic. Um he
he says to him, he says in an interview at
the Times, as he said, eventually the darkness cleared and
I realized I was alive. When the noise and the
blasts subsided, I saw a huge mushroom shaped pillar of
fire rising up high into the guy. It was like
a tornado, although it didn't move, but it rose and
spread out horizontally. At the top there was prismatic light
(10:07):
which was changing in a complicated rhythm, like the patterns
of a kaleidoscope. What a wonderful recollection that is. And
you can find more about that and and all that's
interesting article by John Kurosky. I just think that's a
very obviously horrific scene. That he's describing, but he describes
it with almost like a elegance, you know, he's I mean,
(10:30):
he's had luckily the time to think about this, and
this is one of the most horrible impactful moments of
his life and in the history of Japan. The sun
is blotted out. We said it was about a fifteen
in the morning. The sun is gone because of all
the dust and debris. There are pillars of falling ash.
(10:52):
Like you said, he physically sees the mushroom cloud. He's
just two miles away from debtonation. He is temporarily blinded,
thankfully it's temporary. The blast blew out both of his
ear drums. The left side of this body, there is
a question that I had had originally. The left side
of his body is charred, and he is like at
(11:15):
this point to be clear, if he had just laid
down from shock, he would have died almost certainly. Instead,
this man is able to crawl despite his grievous wounds.
He's able to crawl to a bomb shelter and someone
is able to assist him, and he gets medical assistance.
And then he finds out that get this, his co
(11:38):
workers that were supposed to leave the city also survived
Kuniyoshi Sato and Akira Iwanaka. They stayed in an air
raid shelter overnight as well, and they said, okay, guys,
I think we can all agree we need to get
out of town. We need to leave. We don't need
to have a meeting about it. It's just time to go.
(12:01):
So they get ready to go to Nagasaki. So they
make their way to Nagasaki. But it's not a sure thing,
right They somehow they heard. You know, if you've ever
been in an emergency situation, you know that rumors take
out a life of their own. And so these guys heard,
they overheard people saying the trains were somehow still running.
(12:25):
So they said, okay, we've got to make it to
the train station. And um, when they emerge from that shelter, man,
I cannot imagine what greeted them. Just absolute havoc, chaos,
the walking dead. You know. Um, if you are of
strong constitution, I highly recommend a couple of films um,
(12:48):
both animated Japanese films, The Grave of Fireflies, which is
beautiful and heartbreaking. But then there is another one called
Barefoot jen Um from three and it is this exact
uh scenario that has depicted of the B twenty nine
um dropping. Uh, this this bomb and it shows the fallouse.
(13:13):
I'm watching it right now. It is horrific. It's like
you know, uh, people's skin melting off and teeth falling
out of their heads and eyeballs liquefying and just being
reduced to just pulsating, you know, ash and gore. I mean,
it's really one of the most horrific things I've ever
seen in an animated film. Um. So to see this
(13:35):
and have the perspective of how just two miles away
this man was spared uh and he still received these
really terrible burns on half his body. M h. And
this journey through a destroyed city is something you cannot
really put into words. It's experiential, right, it's phenomenal logical.
(14:00):
You have to go through that experience yourself to fully
understand it. There are cadavers, there are corpses that have
physically melted, and they're everywhere. Buildings are shattered, a lot
of the bridges are twisted. Uh. They get to a
river crossing and Yamaguchi has to swim through a layer
(14:23):
of corpses to reach this station. And when he gets
to the station, it turns out the train is working.
It's filled with people who have narrowly survived the explosion
with terrible, terrible injuries, both mental and of course physical.
But you'll be happy to know, ridiculous historians, he does
(14:47):
make it home to reunite with his wife and their
infant child. And if we fast forward sixteen hours after
the detonation of Little Boy, you see that President Harry
Truman gives a speech that reveals the atomic bomb to
(15:07):
the rest of the world for the first time. Of course,
people like yeah mcgucci are already very well aware that
something catastrophic has occurred, but they didn't know exactly what happened,
what this explosion was. And that's what Truman says. It
is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe.
(15:29):
And in his speech he rationalizes the attack on Japan.
Now we know the flight that Theola Gate took, we
know about the thousands and thousands who died immediately, and
then the toll, the death toll continues, right because people
(15:49):
are dying of other related injuries, tens of thousands of
them for weeks after this. And this is where this
is the same speech where Truman's says, if Japan doesn't surrender,
it can expect a reign of ruin from the air,
the like of which has never been seen on this earth.
It's a war against civilians At that point, I mean, really,
(16:12):
how do we reconcile this in our history? Like it's
just utter terrorism? And I know you know that we're
you know, rock in a hard place, but we've never
had to use this again and resoorts using it again,
and now it's just this whole like game of like
kind of standoff, you know with the folks that have
nuclear powers. But is this something you've ever thought about? Ben, Like,
(16:33):
is are we do as a country? Do we justify
this act? Or is it something we look back on
and in shame. You know, it's a complex topic in
that regard, and you will hear various different answers depending
on people's perspectives. Right about about so many events in
(16:55):
World War two, you know, uh shinzo Abe, the former
prime min star of Japan who was recently assassinated, refused
to apologize for any of Japan's actions in World War
Two from what I understand, But yeah, you know, we
have to keep in mind that I feel like I
have to say this more and more often these days.
(17:15):
When elephants wage war, it's the grass that suffers. So
these are questions that Yamaguchi isn't quite answering at this point, right.
He's just trying to survive, and there is amid all
this horror, I quld you not man. Something that made
(17:36):
me laugh, and we'll get to it in a second.
Here's what happens. He's back in Nagasaki. It's August eight now.
He goes to the hospital and the doctor who is
treating Yamaguchi is an old school chum of his. But
the burns of Yamaguchi endured are so severe that at
first his old friend doesn't recognize him. Neither does his family.
(17:59):
His mom calls him a ghost. When he gets back home,
he's on the verge of collapse. Here's here's the part
that made me laugh a little bit. The next morning,
August nine, still wrapped up in bandages, Yamaguchi gets up
and goes to work. He goes to Mitsubishi's Nagasaki office. Yeah,
(18:21):
that's a pretty serious work ethic there. But I would
say this is let's just consider this a snow day, right, Yeah,
like civilization is under attack. Yeah, yeah, it's at the
very least on pause around eleven am. He he wasn't
the only one, uh, he was in a meeting. They
were having meetings with the director of the company who
(18:43):
wanted a full report on Hiroshima from from the guy
with burns over you know, of his body, um, and
he discussed the events that he had witnessed on on
the sixth, everything from the blinding light to the sound
he His superiors actually were incredulous. They thought that he
(19:04):
was you know, pulling their leg or that he was
in some way, you know, exaggerating because this kind of
the power of this kind of weapon was not really
known yet. They wanted to know how this was possible
because this was based on any artillery or or you know,
armament that they were aware of. This is not something
that exists. Yeah, exactly. It sounds pretty crazy, right, And
(19:27):
if you look at it from the perspective of his employers,
it is understandable that they could find this hard to
believe because he was clearly heavily injured, so he might
not have maybe the most accurate recollection of the disaster
that occurred. And he's telling his employers. He's saying, look,
(19:51):
I'm not crazy. A bomb dropped and it destroyed the
entire city. I hope, he said, all so I showed
up to work, You're welcome, but why are you grilling me?
Get off my back? And the thing is, will never
know if he was about to say that while he
(20:11):
was trying to explain himself, because then, Noel, there was
another explosion. Yeah, there was, Um, you know, you probably
could have seen that coming. They are in Nagasaki at
this point. Uh. That was the side of the second
(20:33):
atomic bomb that was dropped, called fat Man, and this
one was worse. It was more powerful. That's why it
was the fat Man. The other one was a little boy.
He literally saw the city in front of him out
the window of the view of his office just implode,
last shattered instantly, um, sending just all kinds of shards
(20:54):
of you know, deadly broken glass shooting through the room. Again.
Just you can look up the scene if you're interested.
Maybe I don't want to watch the whole movie, but
this movie Barefoot gin Um. If you just type in
Barefoot gen g and nuclear bomb scene, it depicts all
of this stuff that we're describing and just the most
horrific detail. And there's a particular part where it shows
glass windows shattering, and he's just like almost as if
(21:16):
they're like being driven by some sort of like telepathy,
just these shards of glass flying and just you know,
skewering people. I mean, this was very, very real, um.
And sometimes seeing these kinds of things in a cartoon
just makes them even more real. Weirdly, I don't know
why that is, but it's I found that to be
the case. Um. Anyway, So he Yeah, if his bosses
(21:37):
didn't believe him before, as sure as I'll believe him now. Huh. Yeah,
and can you imagine stuff Frommagucci's perspective. In a later
interview with The Independent, he tells them that he sincerely
thought the mushroom Cloud had somehow followed him from Hiroshima,
and yeah, and you can't blame him. And like you said, man,
(21:58):
this second um is even more powerful and luckily, like
so next question is how does he survive this one? Luckily?
The landscape, the topography of the city, it's very hilly, right,
and there was a reinforced stairwell that sort of muffled
the blast inside the office. But his bandages were literally
(22:22):
blown off. He got hit by another surge of radiation.
He had yet again been within two miles of a
nuclear explosion, so he runs from the Midsubishi building. He
is again very very heavily injured, but and this is
(22:43):
something very understandable, his first goal is to find his
family to see if they are alive. He gets to
his neighborhood, noal. He gets to his house and he
sees that part of it has been destroyed in the blast.
But amaze seeingly enough, his wife and his infant son
(23:04):
are okay. They have cuts and bruises, but not like
not injuries that would require hospitalization because they were hiding
in a tunnel. Yeah, I mean, he really just cut.
It doesn't feel like luck at this point, because it
wasn't even something that anybody could have been prepared for
or known necessarily what to do, you know, to make
(23:27):
sure but you didn't get more grievously injured, and you know,
And I was reading some some comments on a message
board about this, and somebody pointed out very grimly that
how messed up is that the people that were closest
to the blast who got vaporized for the lucky ones.
That's something people often speculate about the event of nuclear
(23:50):
war or nuclear exchanges. If you are in a large city,
do you want to live through the initial blast. It's
a heavy question, but it's um It's an important question,
and you'll see why when we examine what happens to Yamaguchi.
And the reason his wife is in the tunnel by
(24:10):
the way, with their son is because she had been
out trying to find burn ointment for her husband, so
she wasn't in the house when it was destroyed. That's
how that's how they ended up hiding in a tunnel.
So you could say, as they mentioned on History dot Com,
that if Yamaguchi hadn't been injured at Hiroshima, his entire
(24:30):
family might have died that day at Nagasaki. Yeah, so
they live in a bomb shelter near what used to
be their house. As Japan surrenders, and then Yamaguchi, along
with so many other people in Japan, learns what happens
when you are exposed to an atomic bomb. And to
(24:52):
that quote you mentioned the message board, this is why
some people say in theory that they would prefer to
be vaporized, and he was, of course, was hit twice
with this radiation. His hair fell out, you know, those
burns that we talked about, started to get infected. He
was vomiting constantly. Um, you know, it was grievously ill.
(25:14):
He described hearing about the surrender of Japan's Emperor Hirohito,
and he said he was completely ambivalent about it because
of his condition. He says, quote, 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 over to the other side. But little
by little he he got better. Didn't even Yeah, he did.
(25:37):
And this is another stroke of great fortune, because many
victims of radiation exposure did not recover, and they would
have injuries that haunted them for the rest of their lives,
or they would die as a result of the radiation.
He went on. Yamaguchi, that is to live surprisingly relatively
(25:59):
nor old life. He was a translator for the US
Armed Forces during their occupation of Japan. He taught school
for a while, and then eventually he gets back into engineering.
For you guessed if folks Mitsubishi. He goes on to
have two more kids in the nineteen fifties. Uh, one
big change in his life. He does take up writing poetry,
(26:22):
but it isn't until many decades later, in the two thousands,
that he ever speaks publicly about his experience. Yeah, that's right,
and I mean we're obviously so glad that he did.
It's it's a it's a powerful story. I mean, you know,
we always talk about what qualifies a historical tail as
being ridiculous, and I think we could probably both agree,
(26:44):
or all three of us could agree that surviving or
just being unlucky enough to be present for two of
histories most brutal and deadly attacks, only to be able
to survive. I think that's ridiculous in and of itself.
And then it's just kind of like it almost is
too too much to believe, you know, it's almost too
(27:07):
insane to believe this could possibly happen, that one person
could be that unlucky but also that lucky. Yeah. Yeah,
going back to that headline really caught me. Later, his
daughter Toshiko points out something that I speak I think
speaks to his character, she says afterwards, meaning after his recovery,
he was fine. We hardly noticed he was a survivor
(27:29):
or what's called a hippop kusha. He was so healthy.
She says that he thought participating in anti bomb protest
or advocating for nuclear disarmament would have been unfair to
people who were really sick. So he had a conscience
about it. You know, he didn't want to be I think,
a performative face of a cause. But like so many people,
(27:56):
so many survivors of the atomic bombs, Suto Yamaguchi ultimately,
along with his family, suffered the long term effects of
radiation exposure. And this is the stuff that gets people
many many years later, both his son and his wife
eventually passed away due to cancer from from the exposure. Yeah,
(28:20):
I mean, and then you know, it's a long game
for a lot of these folks, as we know from
I mean honestly largely on the stuff they don't want
you to know. We talk about corporations that you know,
poison communities with toxic chemicals and um, you know, people's
proximity near nuclear waste dump sites and how that stuff
(28:41):
can leach into the soil and maybe you don't get
sick right away, but it it it becomes this legacy
of of death and illness and and just you know,
reduction of quality of life, and you know, you hear
about class action lawsuits and things like that. Are all
these companies and sometimes that helps and helps pay for things,
but ultimately you're never gonna get your life back. But
(29:02):
it's not like you can sue the United States for
you know, pain and suffering. When it was like, you know,
an active, hot war, right, But best I thought I
was that I was getting out earlier. Then it's like,
at what point does something become a war crime? Like
isn't this overkill? And you think it's not against a
(29:22):
military basis against the Affilian population. That's like where I
think about it too. It's like yeah, I don't know, yeah,
And it's it's a question that people wrestle with in
in the In the time, dropping the atomic bomb was
not seen as a war crime, but it was seen
(29:43):
as a means to an end. The idea was at
least two American military minds that they had a bomb
that could in the war. They had this technology and
if they didn't drop it, they would be traveled, they
would be essentially do mean their American soldiers to die?
So it was a greater good argument from their perspective
(30:06):
but as you know, again from stuff they don't want
you to know, check out our book coming out October
eleven wherever you find books. Um As as you know,
that greater Good argument is one heck of a slippery slope,
and it's a very very dangerous one. And just just
to add, I just I was just googling this as
we were talking about, and there's a really great um
(30:27):
piece on NPR that came out on the seventy five
anniversary of the bombings um from August six, and it
interviews quite a few legal scholars who say today this
absolutely would have been viewed as a war crime. Yes, yeah,
I mean I remember hearing the number of like they
they asked me it would take like seven hundred and
(30:48):
fifty thousand Americans who actually capture Japan. That was the
number that they had flown and floated around a lot,
and they expected millions of deaths of Japanese. But to
your point that that's a really slivery slope saying like, well,
we're actually saving Japanese lives by killing all these Japanese immediately,
(31:10):
like instantly with the nuclear bombs. So it's like it's yeah,
it just doesn't hold up you know, and this as
as Yamaguchi ages, he begins to publicly speak out against
nuclear weapons in general. He writes a memoir he corresponds
(31:31):
with President Barack Obama about this. He appears in a
documentary that is screened at the United Nations in two
thousand and six. He is one of around a hundred
and sixty five survivors who are thought to have survived
both the bombings, both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But Yamaguchi is
(31:53):
distinct because he is the only person who is recognized
by the Japanese government as having survived I've both attacks.
And he only got that recognition, by the way, because
he repeatedly wrote in and asked for it. Fascinating stuff.
And you can find the pictures of this man from
(32:13):
you know, not terribly long ago. He did. He did
pass away in two thousand nine, but not visibly scarred
or mutilated in any ways as a cane. But it
seems like he lived a very full life, you know,
past this tragic event. And obviously, you know, this is
the kind of PTSD that doesn't just like up and disappear.
But you know, I think it's I think he maybe
(32:35):
felt strongly about being recognized as that, not for you know,
some sort of glory, but just so he could talk
to people about it, describe it, yes, living history, yes,
the testimony to the horrors of war, but also the
enduring power of the human spirit, which I know otherwise
(32:55):
might sound a little pretentious or something, but this, this
is a true story. And you know when he passes
away unfortunately due to stomach cancer at the age of ninete,
what I think we can take away from this tale
is that history is always closer than you think. Two
thousand nine was not very long ago at all, and
(33:20):
with that we have to remember that history, the good
and the bad, the joy and the terror, it doesn't
exist in some dusty tone. It's not just a footnote
in a book in the library. It's alive. It's real,
and we forget it at our peril. Absolutely point well made,
(33:41):
and if you want to hear more, you know from
Yamaguchi he actually was a pretty extensive poet. He didn't
speak a ton about the bombings to even his own
family until late in life, but he created uh tanka,
which is a type of poet tree form like a haikuba,
(34:02):
but but but different. Similar that it has a pattern
of of alternating pattern of a number of syllables, so
it is a thirty one syllable poem in the pattern
of five seven five seven seven. Um. I was not
aware of this format, but you can't actually read some
of these that he wrote that he used as a
as a way of expressing some of these memories and
(34:24):
feelings surrounding it. So, um, that's something that you can
look up and maybe get a glimpse a little more
specifically into into this guy's this guy's mind. That's a
beautiful way to in this story. You know, thank you,
thank you for pointing that out. This is only one
story of people who have narrowly survived these tremendous disasters,
(34:45):
and unfortunately, there may be more stories like this in
the future. So this was a little bit of a
heavy wooden but again we believe it is an important
story to tell. History is closer than you think, and
our next episode is closer than you think. No, what
are we doing for our next episode? You know, Ben,
(35:06):
I'm glad you asked for our next episode. We actually
have a really cool partnership with twenty three and me,
the company that you know lets you take your DNA
test and find out all kinds of crazy stuff about
your lineage. And we both took the test and were
I think both uh surprised, pleasantly surprised at how far
these things have come, but we've been both taking them
(35:27):
in the past as well. Lots of cool information about
our lineage that we discussed, but also we just discussed
the history, uh and kind of controversy surrounding the discovery
of DNA itself. Yeah, I feel like Stefan on the
Old S and L Sketch. You know, this episode has everything.
(35:47):
We're not going to do the whole bit. We don't
want to spoil it, but we do hope you tune
in because I think we all had a fascinating time,
even more fascinating than we thought it would be. At
the offset and thanks as always to our super producer,
Mr Max Williams. Thanks of course to Gay Bluesier, our
(36:08):
little research associate. It's all grown up, no he is.
Check out his amazing daily podcast This Day in History Class.
Thanks of course to Alex Williams who can post our track.
Christopher Roscio is here in spirit, Eves Jeff Coates hat
in the world doing amazing things. I gotta thank Max again,
give him another wou love that guy. And thanks to
you Ben for me and a friend travel down the
(36:30):
road and back again. If you're a pal and a Confidanteal,
thank you as well, my friend. We'll see you next time. Folks.
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Ridiculous History News
Hosts And Creators
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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