Just A Little Interruption -- Notes For The Granddaughters -- Nothing About The Bakken -- May 10, 2016

It is being reported that President Obama will become the first sitting US president to visit Hiroshima.

This story resonates with me for several reasons, not least of which my mother-in-law was a young Japanese teenager living in Yokohama area (I could be wrong on that; if my wife reads the blog, she will be quick to correct me on where her mother was living at the time) when Nagasaki/Hiroshima were bombed.

Sam Kean devotes chapter 3 in The Violinist's Thumb to Tsutomu Yamaguchi who was in Hiroshima the day the first nuclear bomb was dropped, and he was in Nagasaki three days later when the second US nuclear bomb was dropped. He survived both and lived to be 93 years old, dying in 2010, of stomach cancer, a not-uncommon cancer in Japan.

Sam Kean/Yamaguchi describe the bomber, the dropping bomb, and the after-effects, at Hiroshima.

Yamaguchi suffered severe injuries, not least of which was "his left arm, fully exposed to the great white flash, had turned black."

His goal was to reach a train station to get home to his wife and son. 

All the bridges had collapsed or burned, so he steeled himself and began crossing an apocalyptic "bridge of corpses" clogging the river, crawling across melted legs and faces. Further upstream, he found a railroad trestle with one steel beam intact, spanning fifty years. He clambered up, crossed the iron tightrope, and descended. He pushed through the mob at the train station and slumped into a train seat. Miraculously the train pulled out soon afterward -- he was saved. The train would run all night, but he was finally headed home, to Nagasaki.

Yamaguchi's trek was foreshadowed in JRR Tolien's The Lord of The Rings, a scene taken from the Somme, WWI. 

Several pages later by Sam Kean:

Ill and swooning, Yamaguchi arrived in Nagasaki early on August 8  (the city would be hit with a nuclear bomb the next day) and staggered home. His family had assumed him lost; he convinced his wife he was not a ghost by showing her his feet, since Japanese ghosts traditionally have none. Yamaguchi rested that day, swimming in and out of consciousness, but obeyed an order the next day to report to Mitsubishi headquarters (his employer) in Nagasaki.

He arrived shortly before 11:00 a.m. Arms and face bandaged, he struggled to relate the magnitude of atomic warfare to his coworkers. But his boss, skeptical, interrupted to browbeat him, dismissing his story as fable. "You're an engineer," he barked. "Calculate it. How could one bomb destroy a whole city?"

Famous last words. Just as this Nostradamus wrapped up, a white light swelled inside the room. Heat prickled Yamaguhi's skin, and he hit the deck of the ship-engineering office.

It is believed that approximately 150 Japanese were in both cities on the days that the nuclear bombs were dropped.

Single-exposure individuals are referred to as hibakusha in Japanese. Double-exposure victims, like Yamaguchi, are referred to as nijyuu hibakusha. Of the 150 nijyu hibakusha, Japan officially recognizes only one: Tsutomu Yamaguchi.

It is impossible to articulate what Yamaguchi went through the next several months, but he did survive. So did his wife. Incredibly by 1950, he and his wife had "regained enough vigor" to want more children, no matter the long term prognosis (the risk of cancer in their children).

Their two daughters, healthy at birth, "endured sickly adolescences and adulthoods. [The Yamaguchis] suspect [their daughters] had inherited a genetically compromised immune system from their twice-bombed father and once-bombed mother."

As noted above, the patriarch died at age 93. Their first son, once-bombed Katsutoshi died at age 58, 50+ years after Nagasaki. His mother, Hisako, lived even longer, dying in 2008 of liver and kidney cancer at age 88.