In the morning of August 6, 1945, Tsutomu Yamaguchi was preparing to head home. The 29-year-old engineer had been in Hiroshima for three months on a business trip and was scheduled to return home to his wife and infant son that day.

That morning, while walking to collect his things from the office, the sky caught fire and an unbelievably loud boom broke the air. Yamaguchi dove into a ditch, but a moment later a shockwave sent him flying into the air. He had been less than two miles from the place where the atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima. This, horrifically, wouldn’t be the last time he would experience an atomic bomb.

From Hiroshima to Nagasaki

When Yamaguchi looked up from where the blast had sent him, he saw a hellish world. “I didn’t know what had happened,” Yamaguchi told The Times. “I think I fainted for a while. 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 without any sound.” The sun had nearly been completely obscured by dust, and ash fell from the air. In the distance, Yamaguchi saw a fiery mushroom cloud rising over the city.

Badly burned, Yamaguchi wandered around until he found some of his coworkers. They spent a painful night in an air raid shelter. The following day, they made their way to the train station.

To get there, they had to pass through carnage. The streets were full of bodies, and most of the city’s bridges had been obliterated, so at one point, Yamaguchi had to swim through a river packed with corpses. Somehow, he reached the train, which was miraculously still running, and took it to his home city of Nagasaki.

There, he made his way to the hospital, where he learned what had happened: the United States had dropped an atomic bomb called “Little Boy” on Hiroshima. 70,000 to 80,000 people had been killed instantly. At the hospital, he was treated by a former schoolmate, but the man did not recognize him because of the extent of his burns on his face. Later, when he came home, his mother thought he was a ghost.

The Nightmare Continues

On August 9, Yamaguchi somehow found the will to make his way to work. That morning the director of Yamaguchi’s company ordered him to tell the full story of what had happened in Hiroshima, but refused to believe him, saying that no weapon could possibly inflict that scale of devastation on a city.

In the middle of their conversation, the sky went white, the windows shattered, and the world fell apart again. A second bomb had been dropped on Nagasaki. Yamaguchi recognized it instantly.

“I thought the mushroom cloud had followed me from Hiroshima,” Yamaguchi later told The Independent. His bandages were blasted off, and he had been exposed to another wave of radiation, but still, he survived. 

After the blast, Yamaguchi made his way home to his wife and son. His house had been destroyed completely, but they were unharmed. His wife had actually been outside with their child searching for burn ointment for Yamaguchi, meaning that the burns that Yamaguchi sustained in Hiroshima may have saved his child’s life. 

Poetry and Memory

Healing was a long process for Yamaguchi. “Until I was about 12, he was wrapped in bandages for his skin wounds, and he went completely bald,” his daughter, Toshiko, told The Independent. “My mother was also soaked in black rain [the radioactive rain that fell after bombings] and was poisoned.”

Still, Yamaguchi went on to find work as a translator for U.S. armed forces while they were occupying Japan. He also continued to work as an engineer at Mitsubishi and had two more children. He was able to live a relatively normal life, but had some health issues, including leukemia, which he recovered from. His wife and son both died of cancer at age 88 and 59 respectively.

Yamaguchi turned to poetry to process what had happened to him, pouring his traumatic memories into tanka, a type of short-form poetry that has specific rules.

Aside from the poems, Yamaguchi avoided speaking publicly about his memories of the twin catastrophes he experienced until the early 2000s, when he became a member of the anti-atomic movement. In 2006, he spoke about nuclear disarmament in front of the United Nations in New York.

He had begun to feel that it was his responsibility to share his story. “I think it is a miracle,” he told The Times of his double survival 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.”

Yamaguchi was not the only person who survived both blasts. His coworkers, Akira Iwanaga and Kuniyoshi Sato, were present for both explosions, and over 100 people may have endured both bombs, but Yamaguchi is the only person recognized by the Japanese government as a niju hibakusha, or “twice-bombed person.” 

The official designation was given to him in 2009. “My double radiation exposure is now an official government record,” Yamaguchi said at the time, per The Mainichi Daily News. “It can tell the younger generation the horrifying history of the atomic bombings even after I die.” To Yamaguchi, it was important to keep the stories of what happened alive. “I have walked and crawled through the bottom of hell,” he told the ABC in 2009. “I should be dead. But it was my fate to keep on living.”

Yamaguchi died at age 93 in 2010. Here is one of his tanka, which describes the world in the wake of the bomb, in aching, brutal simplicity.

They [corpses] are piled atop one another high.

And the ground will never dry.

It is soaked with the fat of all the people

who burned and died.