HONG KONG — Tsutomu Yamaguchi , the only official survivor of both atomic blasts to hit Japan in World War II , died Monday in Nagasaki, Japan.

The cause was stomach cancer, his daughter said on Wednesday. He was 93.

Mr. Yamaguchi, as a 29-year-old engineer for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, was on a business trip in Hiroshima when the United States dropped the first atomic bomb on the morning of Aug. 6, 1945. He was getting off a streetcar when the “Little Boy” device detonated above Hiroshima.

Mr. Yamaguchi said he was less than 2 miles away from ground zero. His eardrums were ruptured and his upper torso was burned by the blast, which destroyed most of the city’s buildings and killed 80,000 people.

Mr. Yamaguchi spent the night in a Hiroshima bomb shelter and returned to his hometown of Nagasaki the following day, according to interviews he gave over the years. The second bomb, known as “Fat Man,” was dropped on Nagasaki on Aug. 9, killing 70,000 people there.

Mr. Yamaguchi was in his Nagasaki office, telling his boss about the Hiroshima blast, when “suddenly the same white light filled the room,” he said in an interview last March with The Independent newspaper.

“I thought the mushroom cloud had followed me from Hiroshima,” he said.

“I could have died on either of those days,” Mr. Yamaguchi said in an August interview with the Mainichi Daily News. “Everything that follows is a bonus.”

Japan surrendered six days after the Nagasaki attack.

Mr. Yamaguchi recovered from his wounds, went to work for the American occupation forces, became a teacher and eventually returned to work at Mitsubishi Heavy. He was in good health for most of his life, said his daughter, Toshiko Yamasaki, which is why he avoided joining in anti-nuclear protests.

“He was so healthy, he thought it would have been unfair to people who were really sick,” Ms. Yamasaki told The Independent.

“Afterwards he was fine,” she said. “We hardly noticed he was a survivor.”

It is believed there were about 165 twice-bombed persons in Japan, known as “nijyuu hibakusha,” although municipal officials in both cities have said Mr. Yamaguchi was the only person to be officially acknowledged as such.

Ms. Yamasaki, who was born in 1948, said her mother also had been “soaked in black rain and was poisoned” by the fallout from the Nagasaki blast. Her mother died in 2008 from kidney and liver cancers. She was 88.

“We think she passed the poison on to us,” Ms. Yamaski said, noting that her brother died of cancer at age 59 and her sister has been chronically ill throughout her life.

In his later years, Mr. Yamaguchi began to speak out about the scourge of atomic weapons. He rarely gave interviews, but he wrote a memoir and was part of a 2006 documentary film about the double-bombing victims. He called for the abolition of nuclear weapons at a showing of the film at the United Nations that year.

At a lecture he gave in Nagasaki last June, Mr. Yamaguchi said he had written to President Obama about banning nuclear arms. And Ms. Yamasaki said he had recently been visited by the American film director James Cameron to discuss a film project on atomic bombs.

Among his benefits as an atomic bomb victim, Mr. Yamaguchi’s funeral costs will be paid by the government.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/07/world/asia/07yamaguchi.html?hp

And you think YOU'VE had a bad day (or two)!

Damn! Missed him!

I can't figure out if he was really lucky or really UNlucky!

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Be nice if he had received some other benefit before he died.

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You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows - Robert A. Zimmerman

Yeah, there's not a lot of consolation in having your funeral costs paid for you.

__________________
" We have nothing to fear but the main stream media itself . . . ."- Adapted from Franklin D Roosevelt for the 21st century

OBK #55

1998 Lincoln Continental - Sold
Max 1984 300TD 285,000 miles - Sold
The Dee8gonator 1987 560SEC 196,000 miles - Sold
Orgasmatron - 2006 CLS500 90,000 miles
2002 C320 Wagon 122,000 miles
2016 AMG GTS 12,000 miles

So was he very unlucky or lucky? Can't figure it out.

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Well, he did live for 63 years after the war. Depending on how much suffering he, his wife and son endured, I'd say he was probably lucky.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/mar/25/hiroshima-nagasaki-survivor-japan

"I can't understand why the world cannot understand the agony of the nuclear bombs," he says, speaking through his daughter. "How can they keep developing these weapons?"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsutomu_Yamaguchi

Like what? What so special about him that he deserves a benefit?

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I can't understand why people get so pissed when you bomb their fleet sitting in the harbor before any declaration of war.

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LOL!

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You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows - Robert A. Zimmerman

Me too.

I can't understand why people kill flies with sledghammers

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I don't understand why they would either. Is this a group of flies we are talking about or just your exaggeration? Was that a group of flies, as you put it at Guadalcanal? Peleliu? Midway and the Kamikaze attacks? Philippines? The list can go on about the "flies" in question but I think you can get the drift.

But to answer your question in a word, safety. Less US lives lost when you destroy major parts of their country and get them to surrender.

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(You forgot Vietnam <-----oversimplifying things a wee bit)

Seems to me like we have been trying to do it in Iraq and Afghanistan for years, the same way.

So how's THAT working out for us?

__________________
1991 560 SEC AMG, 199k <---- 300 hp 10:1 ECE euro HV ...

1995 E 420, 170k "The Red Plum" (sold)

2015 BMW 535i xdrive awd Stage 1 DINAN, 6k, <----364 hp

1967 Mercury Cougar, 49k

2013 Jaguar XF, 20k <----340 hp Supercharged, All Wheel Drive (sold)

How so? Iraq and Afghanistan is NOT a glass zone at this time, is it? Tora Bora was not leveled, is it? We had commanders like Halsey who could say that they would only be speaking Japanese in hell. Today, we have that sensitivity crap. How is it similar? We could firebomb them into submission then. Today, we have to try hit the guy who is hiding behind what we THINK is a civilian. Tomorrow, he could pick up the AK-47 and be a soldier. Back then we knew who the enemy was.

__________________
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