Tsutomu Yamaguchi – A man who survived both atomic bombings (2023)

[frozenbit]

It’s been posted on HN before, but if this topic interests you, John Hersey’s famous reporting on the aftermath at Hiroshima (entitled “Hiroshima”) is worth reading. It’s essentially a short book, but the accounts laid out in the story make the impersonal tragedy into something that’s tangible. It should be required reading.

[jebarker]

In a similar vein, going to Hiroshima and the Peace Memorial Museum there was a life changing experience for me.

[philipkglass]

Hiroshima is available here as a PDF: https://learn.k20center.ou.edu/lesson/503/John%20Hersey%20Hi...

[ElFitz]

There’s also a second reporting, from years later, on what some of the survivors have become.

It tells about the lifelong vaguely defined health impacts those exposed to the bomb had to live with, and how they tried to rebuild their lives after having truly lost everything and, for some of them, everyone.

[0x1ceb00da]

Also barefoot gen.

[userbinator]

...and just in case you're tempted to take sides, don't forget about Pearl Harbor nor the Nanjing Massacre either.

[_xnmw]

Reminds me of when the full-scale invasion started in Ukraine, I was in Kharkiv, and I met several people for whom "this was not their first war". The neighbour's family was from Nagorno-Karabakh, and had just fled the Armenia-Azerbaijan war that started a year earlier, the taxi driver was a Syrian refugee, and Kharkiv has many people from the Donbass region where the war started years before.

People who have experienced one extremely unlikely event are more likely to experience it again, see Poisson clumping (although I know this type of event is not independently random). Ernest Hemingway and his wife survived two plane crashes a day apart.

[ellis0n]

The similarities in repetitions are indeed present, but not only in wars. No one forced this person to go to work after such an event, but apparently, he is truly an exceptional worker, and the Mitsubishi managers were incredibly fortunate. He was already on his 9th day back at work, covered in bandages, after a nuclear explosion. (Of course, I think he wanted to share his experience as soon as possible to help others, given it was wartime.)

After the start of the war in Ukraine, companies divided into three categories:

Good ones: They paid 3+ months' salaries in advance, covered the relocation costs for the entire family, and other expenses. For startups, these were donation-investments of $100k like in Awesonic (YC).

Ordinary ones: They paid nothing extra but provided some money for relocation until the next salary.

Bad ones: They paid nothing, no advance payment and demanded reports for working hours from bomb shelters during bombings.

I think such coincidences are not accidental, and this case with Tsutomu falls into either the 2nd or 3rd category. It's unclear how these coincidences would play out in peaceful life without war, but no one knew them except the management of the company where he worked.

Are you still in Kharkiv?

[_yb2s]

That isn’t true, and isn’t what poisson clumping is caused by. Totally random independent events clump together entirely by chance: having experienced one doesn’t increase or reduce the probability of it occurring again.

[cypherpunks01]

Was anyone else bothered by how Oppenheimer declined to show even a single scene of the devastation that was caused by dropping nuclear weapons on Japan?

I otherwise liked the film, but I thought it was wrong to hide it from viewers. The bombing was the central plot point of the whole film. It would have been different if it was a new director, or surprise hit or something, but Nolan knew it would be seen by many millions of people.

It could have been shown without losing any narration context at all, in the scene where the protagonist is shown slides of the destruction scenes, and the camera only shows him looking away. The director didn't need to force the audience to look away too.

[xvedejas]

No, it didn't bother me; Oppenheimer himself never saw the devastation, he only could imagine it. It seems suiting for what the film was doing, to focus on his inner emotional state.

[voltaireodactyl]

I for one was not bothered — the film up to that point had exclusively portrayed Oppenheimer‘s subjective experience in life. To showcase the footage you’re talking about would have meant showing events Oppenheimer did not see, but was certainly able to imagine enough that they affected him deeply — which is what WAS depicted in place of the footage.

While I understand wanting that outside perspective included within Oppenheimer to more fully reflect the actual historic events, I recognize that Oppenheimer was a film telling the story of one man’s internal perspective on events, and so including scenes like you suggest would have diluted and weakened that central premise and through line.

That being said: I am biased in that I do not expect artistic works to reflect a complete reality, but just the reality they choose to explore — I can certainly understand different points of view, especially with regard to such a monumental and tragic real life event.

[725686]

I was so bored, that I wasn't bothered by it. I love Christopher Nolan's other movies though.

[pokstad]

According to my favorite scene in the movie: Oppenheimer didn’t drop the bomb, Truman did. Now get that cry baby out of here.

[spinoutx]

I can understand the artistic choice to portray everything from Oppenheimer's mind / point of view and to not actually show the devastation, but like you I was bothered by how it was done with the bomb drop and also the complete lack of portraying the Nazi threat. Oppenheimer lived the entire war at home and never actually saw the bomb dropped. But it seemed disingenuous to me to show the power of his imagination when contemplating the universe so powerfully at the beginning of the film, then never portray his comprehension of the Nazi threat or the devastation his weapon would have caused. The closest they got was him imagining it in the room with the crowd, but that hardly did it justice in my opinion. That was critical context in many of the scientists' decisions: 27,000 people were dying PER DAY during World War 2 (on average). How you can portray the story of the atomic bomb without that setting (not to mention emphasizing the fear that the Axis would get the bomb first) is kind of beyond me.

[dandanua]

The film was made for entertainment. It doesn't teach morality or answers hard existential questions. It's a comics inspired by reality, in my opinion.

[gnat]

"Sorry, this content is not available in your region."

No biography.com for you, New Zealand.

Welcome to Aotearoa, where history is doomed to be repeated!

[dotancohen]

From the fine article:

  > Yamaguchi was born in Nagasaki, Japam, on March 16, 1916.

Either biography.com doesn't proofread, or their proofreader is on vacation in New Zealand and can't access the content either.

[keyle]

Same here.

"Let's have a dot com and block large parts of the world from accessing it"

[jackvalentine]

As annoying as this is - at least it's a very simple HTML page error that loaded instantly. That made me feel glad?

[Kodiack]

I wonder what us kiwis did to deserve this.

[tagh]

My best guess is an over-zealous response to some content licensing deal.

[microflash]

To be fair, this ain't available in India either.

[jp0d]

I can't access it in Australia either.

[JKCalhoun]

How haunting. I can't imagine having seen/survived one atomic bomb and then to see the same flash in Nagasaki. He must have thought the U.S. was going to sweep all of Japan. I think I'd head to the mountains.

[Kodiack]

“Sorry, this content is not available in your region.”

What a short and sad story.

[keyle]

Also the best way to survive atomic bombings. Don't be in the region.

[doctorpangloss]

Here's something even wilder: This guy comes up in GPT-4o queries all the time, because of how ridiculously overindexed it is on Hacker News.

[zackfield]

What an awful experience. I can't imagine going through something like that and remaining silent about it for decades.

If you want to read a novel from the perspective of someone experiencing the bombing of Hiroshima (based on historical records) I highly recommend Black Rain by Masuji Ibuse

[bamboozled]

I can imagine the staying silent part is dealing with trauma ? I have family who returned from the war and couldn't discuss it.

[aussieguy1234]

For anyone who gets "Sorry, this content is not available in your region": https://archive.is/IwLEw

Currently affecting Australian and New Zealand readers.

[webwielder2]

Is it a testament to the Japanese rail system that he was able to get to work in Nagasaki the next day after Hiroshima was f*cking nuked?

[acureau]

I can't imagine showing up to work the next day at all, holy shit.

[bamboozled]

Reading this is truly harrowing. It makes me also realize how truly deplorable Putin is for constantly threatening to recreate such a situation for his own personal gain. Seems to me that people like him haven't read this persons account of what it was like.

Still wounded and heavily bandaged, Yamaguchi returned to work on August 9, the day Nagasaki was bombed.

That is the greatest example of Japanese work ethic and the harsh expectations people can be put under.

[SSJPython]

> It makes me also realize how truly deplorable Putin is for constantly threatening to recreate such a situation for his own personal gain.

I don't think Putin is doing this for his own personal gain. I think the majority of Russian leaders in Putin's place would probably have taken a similar course of action. Maybe not threatening nuclear war, but definitely having a similar Ukraine policy.

[layer8]

It might just be a great example of having to put food on the table in difficult times.

[advael]

Incredible that he lived so long despite the exposure

[userbinator]

Japan consistently stays at or near the top of countries by life expectancy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe...

[hammyhavoc]

"Pure evil" is the only way I can describe what human beings do to each other.

There's goodness too in the world, but reading this and other experiences of war, genocide, slavery, terror, crime et al—human beings can be unspeakably ugly in their actions.

[aaron695]

https://archive.is/IwLEw

But, but, but, I've seen the movie "Threads (1984)" so now I'm an expert and it's not possible.

Also how come all the children in the area can still speak, in "Threads" children mutate and can't speak like a reverse Spiderman.

This seems like Doomer-denial fake news, the movie Threads (1984) was the real one.

[mango7283]

I trust one recognises that a huge difference between a post WW2 and a Threads post Ww3 situation is that in the former the United States is at its peak and regearing its industry to rebuild Japan and Europe while in the latter the US is also a nuclear wasteland...

[aussieguy1234]

"Sorry, this content is not available in your region."

[ithkuil]

I always find it fascinating to hear stories like that and immediately feeling bad that my first thought is: what is the likelihood of this being an identity theft comlared with likelihood that after surviving two atomic bombs one lives up to 93 years?

[mensetmanusman]

Not sure why the downvotes, there have been many fake survivor stories from WW2.