Tsutomu Yamaguchi

Yamaguchi was a 29-year-old naval engineer on a business trip for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. August 6 was supposed to be his last day in Hiroshima. That morning, walking toward the docks, he realized he had forgotten his identification stamp and turned back to retrieve it. At 8:15 a.m., while he was still in the open, the bomb fell. The explosion ruptured his eardrums, temporarily blinded him, and left severe burns across the left side of his upper body.

He spent the night in an air raid shelter, and the next day boarded a train packed with other survivors heading west. He arrived in Nagasaki, his home city, on August 8. Despite his injuries, he reported to work the following morning. At 11:00 a.m. on August 9, he was in an office describing the Hiroshima explosion to his supervisor when a flash lit the windows. The second bomb had dropped. Yamaguchi later said he thought the mushroom cloud had followed him from Hiroshima.

The Nagasaki blast again caught him roughly three kilometers away, but this time he was inside a reinforced building and escaped without additional serious injuries. His wife and infant son, who had been at home in Nagasaki throughout, also survived.

Yamaguchi lived with the effects of radiation exposure for the rest of his life. He lost hearing in his left ear, developed cataracts and acute leukemia, and watched his wife die of kidney and liver cancer in 2008. In his later years, he became a vocal advocate for nuclear disarmament, speaking at the United Nations and telling interviewers that he hated the atomic bomb for what it did to human dignity.

He died of stomach cancer in January 2010, at ninety-three years old.