Filed by: The Author of tIoGT
Every one has their good days and their bad ones. Some days you are walking on air, and others….. well you probably just shouldn’t have got out of bed.Well as bad as your day might be, spare a thought for poor old ‘Lucky’ Tsutomu Yamaguchi. A man you definitely wouldn’t want to be sitting next to on a plane!
Although there is obviously nothing funny about the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the closing days of World War II, I have to admit I found Tsutomu’s tale fairly amusing. Good for a bit of a giggle anyway.
The story starts on August 6th 1945 with poor old Yamaguchi-san on a business trip to Hiroshima for his employer Mitsubishi Shipyards. A few seconds before 8:15am he apparently noticed a low hum in the sky and looked up to see a peculiar air craft drop something from its bomb doors. Unfortunately for him, he was looking at the Anola Gay and its ‘Littleboy’ payload, the nuclear warhead that vaporized much of Hiroshima and 140,000 other people. Obviously not a good way to start your Wednesday morning.
Fortunately though, Tsutomu managed to survive the blast, despite burns to most of his body, loss of hearing in his left ear, and the future onset of leukemia, cataracts and other radiation-related illnesses.
With the city in tatters, he managed to somehow limp home to safety. Making a 3 day treck to his home city of……..wait for it……you wont believe it……Yes, you guessed it, Nagasaki.
One can only imagine the look on his face when he looked up to see the second B-29 superfortress coming towards him in 72 hours.
It reminded me of that old line, “You are so unlucky that if you fell into a barrel full of tits youd come up sucking your thumb!”
This being the case though, given the global reputation of American Armed Services personel as rude, abbrasive brutes, I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised by all this. I think dropping two atom bombs on the same chap is a touch rude even by their standards. I mean one nuclear warhead is bad enough, but two? Its just bad manners isnt it. Deffinetly not cricket.
In any case, poor old Yamaguchi-san’s luck finally ran out this week. Finally passing away at age 93. I am not sure what it took to finally knock him off, but am guessing it may have been the same thing that happened to Rasputin.
Interestingly enough, a week before he passed away, he received a visit from Hollywood film director James Cameron, in Japan to promote the release of recently released blockbuster Avatar. Cameron was reportadly interested in discussing ideas for a film on Nuclear Weapons. You heard it hear first!
