On August 6, 1945, he was about to leave the city of Hiroshima, where he had been working, when the first bomb exploded, killing 140,000 people. Injured and reeling from the horrors around him, he fled to his home — Nagasaki, 180 miles to the west. There, on August 9, the second atomic bomb exploded over his head.
A few dozen others were in a similar position, but none expressed the experience with as much emotion and fervour. Towards the end of his life, Mr Yamaguchi received another distinction — the only man to be officially registered as a hibakusha, atomic bomb victim, in both cities.
“I think it is a miracle,” he told The Times on the 60th anniversary of the bombings in 2005. “But having been granted this miracle it is my responsibility to pass on the truth to the people of the world. For the past 60 years survivors have declared the horror of the atomic bomb, but I can see hardly any improvement in the situation.”
In the summer of 1945 he was 29 and working as a draughtsman designing oil tankers for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. His three-month secondment to a shipyard in Hiroshima was due to end on the morning of August 6, when the American B29 bomber Enola Gay dropped a 13-kilotonne uranium atomic bomb, nicknamed Little Boy. It exploded above Hiroshima at 8.15am.
“I didn’t know what had happened,” Mr Yamaguchi said. “I think I fainted. When I opened my eyes everything was dark and I couldn’t see much. It was like the start of a film at the cinema, before the picture has begun when the blank frames are just flashing up. I thought I might have died but eventually the darkness cleared and I realised I was alive.”
He and two colleagues staggered through the ruins where the dead and dying lay all around. At one collapsed bridge the three had to wade through a river, parting before them a floating carpet of corpses. They reached the station and boarded the train for Nagasaki. Reporting to work at the shipyard on August 9, his story of a single bomb destroying an entire city was met with incredulity.
“The director was angry. He said ‘you’ve obviously been badly injured, and I think you’ve gone a little mad’. At that moment, outside the window, I saw another flash and the whole office, everything in it, was blown over.” The next thing he remembered was waking to hear crying and cheering at the broadcast by Emperor Hirohito announcing Japan’s surrender.
