Twice in the Blast

In the summer of 1945, as World War II neared its devastating climax, a 29-year-old Japanese engineer named Tsutomu Yamaguchi boarded a train from his hometown of Nagasaki to Hiroshima. Employed by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, he was sent on a three-month business trip to help design a new oil tanker. The city of Hiroshima was still untouched by war, a bustling industrial hub nestled among green hills and quiet rivers.

Yamaguchi completed his assignment and planned to return home on August 6th. That morning, he stepped out to catch his train. The sky was bright and clear. As he approached the shipyard, he looked up—startled by the deep, humming roar of an American B-29 bomber overhead.

What he saw next would follow him for the rest of his life.

A sudden, blinding flash of light tore across the sky. A split second later, the shockwave from Little Boy, the first atomic bomb, ripped through the city. The force threw Yamaguchi into the air. His eardrums burst. He was enveloped in heat, glass, and fire.

The blast radius had obliterated nearly everything within two kilometers. Yamaguchi had been 3 km from ground zero. Badly burned, temporarily blinded, and deafened, he somehow survived the chaos and made his way to a nearby air raid shelter. The city behind him was unrecognizable—flattened, burning, screaming.

That night, through the ruins and ash, he stumbled to a train station—miraculously still functioning—and boarded the last train out of Hiroshima, heading home to Nagasaki.

It should have been the end of the horror. But fate had other plans.

Yamaguchi arrived in Nagasaki on August 8th, wrapped in bandages, shaken, yet alive. He went to the hospital, then reported to work the next day, eager to explain to his boss what had happened in Hiroshima.

As he tried to describe the unnatural brightness, the boom that came from nowhere, and the suffocating wave of heat, his superior scoffed. “You’re an engineer,” the man said. “You must be hallucinating. One bomb can’t destroy a whole city.”

Just then, the world exploded—again.

The second atomic bomb, Fat Man, was dropped on Nagasaki on August 9th at 11:02 a.m.

Yamaguchi was inside the office building when it happened. Once more, a white-hot flash split the sky. The walls buckled. Glass shattered. The force of the blast, though partially shielded by the building’s structure, was still immense.

Somehow, impossibly, he survived a second time.

The blast radius in Nagasaki was smaller due to the city’s hills, but over 70,000 people still perished. Many of Yamaguchi’s family and coworkers were killed instantly. His wife and infant son, who were sheltering in a reinforced tunnel near their home, survived too—thanks to a last-minute decision he had insisted on after his Hiroshima ordeal.

The war ended days later. Japan surrendered on August 15th, after Emperor Hirohito’s unprecedented radio address confirmed what few yet understood—the country had been destroyed not by firebombs or invasion, but by two singular weapons of unimaginable power.

In the years that followed, Tsutomu Yamaguchi quietly resumed life in Nagasaki. He returned to Mitsubishi. He raised children. But the pain never left him. His body bore the scars of both bombs: raw burns, radiation sickness, partial deafness. More than the physical wounds, it was the memory of those bright flashes—the light of annihilation—that haunted him.

At first, he stayed silent. In postwar Japan, survivors of the atomic bombings, known as hibakusha, were often stigmatized. People feared radiation exposure, or saw them as cursed. Many hibakusha chose not to speak of their experience.

But in time, Yamaguchi found his voice.

In 1957, he was officially recognized by the Japanese government as a survivor of the Hiroshima bombing. He applied again, this time asking for recognition as a survivor of both bombings. It took decades, but in 2009, just one year before his death, the Japanese government finally acknowledged the truth:

Tsutomu Yamaguchi was the only person officially certified to have survived both atomic bombs.

He spent his final years advocating for nuclear disarmament. “The reason that I hate the atomic bomb is because of what it does to the dignity of human beings,” he once said in an interview. "I can’t understand why the world cannot ban nuclear weapons."

He met with foreign diplomats, wrote letters, and shared his story, not out of bitterness, but from hope that no one else would ever experience what he had.

Tsutomu Yamaguchi died of stomach cancer in 2010 at the age of 93.

His life remains one of history’s most astonishing true tales of survival—not just of war or disaster, but of the human spirit’s resilience in the face of annihilation. He lived not in hatred, but in humble awe of life and its fragility. Two blinding flashes changed his world, but they did not define his humanity.