Guest Thinkers — January 7, 2010

Survivor Dies

The only official survivor of both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs in Japan has died of stomach cancer in his nineties.

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The only official survivor of both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs in Japan has died of stomach cancer in his nineties. Tsutomu Yamaguchi witnessed at close hand the nuclear devastation of two Japanese cities, and lived to tell the tale. Now it will be left to others to tell his incredible story after his death this week at 93. Yamaguchi, the only person officially recognised as a survivor of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, died on Monday of stomach cancer at a hospital in Nagasaki, his family said today. The mayor of Nagasaki said, “A precious storyteller has been lost.” Yamaguchi, then an engineer for the shipbuilder Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, was in Hiroshima on a business trip on 6 August 1945 when an American B-29 bomber, the Enola Gay, dropped an atomic bomb on the city, killing 80,000 people instantly and another 60,000 in the months that followed. The badly burned Yamaguchi, who was less than two miles from the blast, spent the night in an air raid shelter before returning home to Nagasaki, 180 miles away, two days later.”

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