Tsutomu Yamaguchi: The Man Who Survived Two Atom Bombs — Transcript

Full transcript

1. 0:00He stepped down from the tram onto a
2. 0:01Hiroshima street on the morning of
3. 0:03August 6th, 1945,
4. 0:05and for one ordinary second, the day was
5. 0:07only warm and bright. Then the sky
6. 0:10turned white. A young engineer named
7. 0:12Tsutomu Yamaguchi was thrown flat
8. 0:14against the earth, ears ringing, eyes
9. 0:17blind. And in the strange silence that
10. 0:19followed, he had a single impossible
11. 0:21thought, that he had just watched the
12. 0:23sun fall out of the heavens and land on
13. 0:25the city around him. He did not yet know
14. 0:28that he had survived the first atomic
15. 0:30bomb ever dropped on a living
16. 0:32population. He did not yet know it was
17. 0:34only the first thing he would survive.
18. 0:37Yamaguchi was 29 years old, an engineer
19. 0:40for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, a man
20. 0:42who designed oil tankers. He was not a
21. 0:45soldier. He carried no rifle. He carried
22. 0:48a satchel and a set of drawings. He had
23. 0:51come to Hiroshima on a routine business
24. 0:53trip, 3 months of ordinary work drawing
25. 0:56to a close, and that very morning he had
26. 0:58planned to catch a train home to
27. 0:59Nagasaki,
28. 1:00to his wife Hisako and their infant son.
29. 1:03He had already said his goodbyes to the
30. 1:05city. That morning, in fact, he had
31. 1:07realized he'd forgotten his travel
32. 1:09documents at the office, and he had
33. 1:11turned back to retrieve them. It was
34. 1:13that small errand, an ordinary act of
35. 1:15forgetfulness, that placed him on that
36. 1:17street at that hour beneath that sky. He
37. 1:21was walking back toward the shipyard
38. 1:23when the world came apart. The
39. 1:24improbable part of his story had not
40. 1:27even begun. It was about to. When his
41. 1:30site returned, Hiroshima was gone. Not
42. 1:32destroyed in the ordinary sense, erased.
43. 1:35Where a city had stood, there was now a
44. 1:37plane of smoke and fire under a rising
45. 1:39column of cloud, black and churning,
46. 1:42climbing miles into the sky. Yamaguchi's
47. 1:45left side was burned, his eardrums
48. 1:48ruptured, his hearing reduced to a dull
49. 1:50roar. He was roughly 3 km from the point
50. 1:53beneath the blast, close enough to be
51. 1:56marked for life, far enough to keep it.
52. 1:58Around him people moved like shadows
53. 2:01through the haze. He did not scream. He
54. 2:03did not run. He began very slowly to
55. 2:06think about how a man gets home from the
56. 2:08end of the world. And home was 180 miles
57. 2:11away. That night he sheltered in the
58. 2:14ruins. And in the morning he began to
59. 2:16move.
60. 2:18He crossed a river choked with wreckage,
61. 2:20walking over what had once been a
62. 2:21bridge. And he made his way through a
63. 2:24landscape that had no names left on it.
64. 2:26Landmarks he had passed only the day
65. 2:28before were simply gone. And he
66. 2:30navigated by instinct and rumor,
67. 2:32following the flow of others who were
68. 2:34also, somehow, still walking. He was
69. 2:37searching for the train station because,
70. 2:39incredibly, on the far edge of the
71. 2:40devastation, the trains were still
72. 2:42running. Japan's railways, battered and
73. 2:45burning, had not entirely stopped.
74. 2:48Somewhere out there,
75. 2:50a locomotive was waiting with steam in
76. 2:52its boiler,
77. 2:53ready to carry survivors away.
78. 2:55Yamaguchi, half deaf, one hand wrapped
79. 2:58in cloth, his face raw from the heat,
80. 3:02set his mind on a single objective. He
81. 3:04would find that train. And he would not
82. 3:06stop until he was on it.
83. 3:09He reached the station and boarded a
84. 3:10night train packed with the wounded and
85. 3:12the stunned. And it carried him south
86. 3:14through the dark. Imagine the journey. A
87. 3:17country at war,
88. 3:19a rail line held together by exhausted
89. 3:21men.
90. 3:22And inside the carriages a silence made
91. 3:24of shock. Yamaguchi drifted in and out
92. 3:27of consciousness against the window
93. 3:28glass.
94. 3:29The burned side of his body pressed away
95. 3:31from the crowd. He had no way to send
96. 3:34word ahead.
97. 3:35His family in Nagasaki did not know
98. 3:37whether he was alive or dead. The
99. 3:39newspapers carried only fragments, and
100. 3:41the full scale of what had happened to
101. 3:43Hiroshima had not yet reached the rest
102. 3:45of the country. The train ran through
103. 3:47the night and into the next day,
104. 3:49threading the mountains. And with every
105. 3:51mile the impossible thing he had lived
106. 3:53through fell a little further behind. He
107. 3:55was going home. He was going to
108. 3:57Nagasaki, the one city on Earth where he
109. 4:00believed he would finally be safe. He
110. 4:02could not have chosen worse.
111. 4:04He arrived in Nagasaki on August 8th and
112. 4:07went straight to a doctor who wrapped
113. 4:09his burns in fresh bandages.
114. 4:11His hearing was still gone on one side.
115. 4:14His face and arm raw beneath the
116. 4:16dressings.
117. 4:18His family wept to see him alive.
118. 4:20They had feared the worst, and here he
119. 4:22was walking through the door. And
120. 4:25Yamaguchi, being the man he was, did
121. 4:28something almost unbelievable. On the
122. 4:30morning of August 9th,
123. 4:32swollen, bandaged, deafened, barely able
124. 4:35to stand,
125. 4:36he got up, put on his suit, and reported
126. 4:39for work at the Mitsubishi office. He
127. 4:41believed he owed his colleagues an
128. 4:43account of what he had seen. He walked
129. 4:45into that office and began to describe
130. 4:47it.
131. 4:48A single bomb, a single flash, an entire
132. 4:51city gone in an instant. And across the
133. 4:54room, his supervisor listened with
134. 4:56folded arms and told him plainly that he
135. 4:59had lost his mind. "You are an
136. 5:02engineer,"
137. 5:03the supervisor said. "Calculate it. How
138. 5:06could one bomb destroy a whole city?"
139. 5:08Yamaguchi opened his mouth to answer. He
140. 5:11was standing there, mid-sentence, trying
141. 5:14to make a sane man believe an insane
142. 5:16truth,
143. 5:17when the office windows lit up white.
144. 5:19The same light, the same silence, the
145. 5:22same invisible hand that had thrown him
146. 5:24to the ground in Hiroshima now reached
147. 5:26across 180 miles and threw him down
148. 5:28again in Nagasaki. It was 11:02 in the
149. 5:31morning. The second atomic bomb had
150. 5:34detonated over the city,
151. 5:35and Tsutomu Yamaguchi, still wrapped in
152. 5:38the bandages of the first, was inside
153. 5:41the blast radius of the second. Again,
154. 5:43the odds should have killed him. Again,
155. 5:45they didn't.
156. 5:46He was roughly the same distance from
157. 5:48this second detonation as he had been
158. 5:50from the first. And once more, the
159. 5:52geometry of the thing spared his life
160. 5:54while marking it. The bandages were
161. 5:56blasted from his body. The office
162. 5:59collapsed around him. And in the chaos,
163. 6:01his first frantic thought was not of
164. 6:03himself at all. It was of his wife and
165. 6:06his infant son somewhere out in that
166. 6:08burning city.
167. 6:10He clawed his way free of the rubble and
168. 6:12went looking for them through streets
169. 6:14that had, for the second time in 3 days,
170. 6:17ceased to exist. He had survived two
171. 6:19atomic bombs. Now, he had to find out
172. 6:22whether his family had survived one.
173. 6:24They had. Hisako and the baby had gone
174. 6:26out that morning to search for burn
175. 6:28ointment for Tsutomu's Hiroshima wounds.
176. 6:30And the errand had carried them, by pure
177. 6:32chance, into a tunnel, a sheltered place
178. 6:35that shielded them when the sky opened.
179. 6:37Had his wounds been lighter, they might
180. 6:39not have gone at all. The very injuries
181. 6:41from the first bomb had, in a roundabout
182. 6:44way, helped spare his family from the
183. 6:46second. When Yamaguchi found them alive
184. 6:49amid the ruins, the improbability of it
185. 6:51must have felt less like luck than like
186. 6:53something he could not name. The three
187. 6:55of them survived the days that followed
188. 6:57in a shelter, sick with what no one yet
189. 7:00fully understood,
190. 7:01the invisible aftermath that came for
191. 7:03survivors long after the fire was out, a
192. 7:06slow and silent illness that doctors of
193. 7:08the time had no name for. And then, on
194. 7:10August 15th, a voice came over the
195. 7:13radio,
196. 7:14a voice most Japanese had never heard,
197. 7:16the emperor, announcing that the war was
198. 7:19over. For decades afterward,
199. 7:21Tsutomu Yamaguchi did not speak of it.
200. 7:24This is the part of his story that is
201. 7:26easy to miss. He did not become famous.
202. 7:29He did not tour the world. He went back
203. 7:32to work, raised his family, translated
204. 7:34documents, taught school, wrote quiet
205. 7:37poetry, and carried inside him a thing
206. 7:40so enormous that few people would have
207. 7:41believed it if he told them. He had been
208. 7:43at the center of both. He was quite
209. 7:46literally one of the only human beings
210. 7:48to walk out of both Hiroshima and
211. 7:50Nagasaki. And for most of his long life,
212. 7:53he kept that knowledge close. A private
213. 7:55weight. Spoken of rarely and carefully.
214. 7:58Something changed him near the end.
215. 8:00Something made the quiet man decide to
216. 8:02speak.
217. 8:03What changed was age and grief and a
218. 8:06growing certainty that the world was
219. 8:08forgetting. His son, exposed as an
220. 8:11infant, died young. Yamaguchi himself
221. 8:14lived with the long shadow of that day
222. 8:16in his body all his life,
223. 8:18carried through decades of quiet
224. 8:19dignity. For years, he had believed that
225. 8:22speaking of it too openly might seem
226. 8:24like asking for pity, and so he had
227. 8:26stayed silent. A private man who felt
228. 8:28his story belonged to him alone. But as
229. 8:30he grew old, he came to feel that his
230. 8:32survival, so unlikely, so absurd, so
231. 8:35nearly impossible, had to mean
232. 8:37something. That he had been left alive
233. 8:39to say a thing no one else could say
234. 8:41with the same authority. So in his 80s
235. 8:43and 90s, at last, he began to talk. He
236. 8:46spoke to journalists from The Times and
237. 8:48The Independent. He wrote poetry about
238. 8:51what he had seen.
239. 8:52He appeared frail and dignified, and he
240. 8:55told the world what one bomb could do,
241. 8:57and then what a second one could do to
242. 8:59the same man. In 2009, the Japanese
243. 9:02government did something it had never
244. 9:03done before. It officially recognized
245. 9:06Tsutomu Yamaguchi as a Nijyu Hibakusha,
246. 9:09a double survivor.
247. 9:11A person confirmed to have lived through
248. 9:12both atomic bombings. Others had been
249. 9:15present at both cities, but he was the
250. 9:17only individual ever granted that formal
251. 9:19official recognition.
252. 9:21His name entered into the record as the
253. 9:23living proof of a thing almost too
254. 9:24strange to believe. Late in life, he
255. 9:27traveled when his health allowed, and he
256. 9:29carried one message wherever he went,
257. 9:32delivered without anger and without
258. 9:34spectacle. "Nuclear weapons," he said,
259. 9:37"must never be used again on any human
260. 9:39being." He had earned the right to say
261. 9:41it in a way no politician or general
262. 9:44ever could. He had stood beneath two of
263. 9:46them and lived, and still he did not
264. 9:49speak of revenge. He spoke of children.
265. 9:52Tsutomu Yamaguchi died in January 2010
266. 9:55at the age of 93.
267. 9:57He had survived the two most destructive
268. 9:59weapons ever used against human beings,
269. 10:02separated by 3 days and 180 miles, and
270. 10:05he had gone on to live nearly seven more
271. 10:06decades, long enough to see
272. 10:08grandchildren, long enough to become an
273. 10:10old man in a quiet house with paper
274. 10:12screens and a garden. When people asked
275. 10:14him how he had survived, he never
276. 10:17claimed it was strength or cleverness.
277. 10:19He said simply that it had not been his
278. 10:21time. What he did with the time he was
279. 10:24given was refuse to let the world
280. 10:25forget. A folded paper crane, an old
281. 10:29man's steady voice, a warning passed
282. 10:31forward so that no one else would ever
283. 10:33have to survive what he survived. That
284. 10:35was the whole of it. That was enough. If
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