TOKYO — Tsutomu Yamaguchi, the only person officially recognized as a survivor of both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings at the end of World War II, has died at age 93.
Yamaguchi was in Hiroshima on a business trip for his shipbuilding company on Aug. 6, 1945, when a U.S. B-29 dropped an atomic bomb on the city. He suffered serious burns to his upper body and spent the night in the city.
He then returned to his hometown of Nagasaki, about 190 miles southwest, which suffered a second U.S. atomic bomb attack three days later.
The mayor of Nagasaki said "a precious storyteller has been lost,"...
And his story was, "Holy #$%^&*. I surrender already!"
The story goes on to say, "Japan is the only country to have suffered atomic bombs."
I prefer the verb "earned".
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3 comments:
I prefer the verb "earned".
Absolutely!
I have this vision of the bombardier pulling the lever, and then as Fat Man falls towards the target, the bombardier shouts out of the open bomb bay door, "Remember Nanking!"
But first, a skywriting airplane,
"Surrender, Tsutomu!"
I'll bet he kept quiet bout this for a while. Would YOU want him in your neighbourhood?
I prefer "earned", too. If it were simply a matter of some innocent city, somewhere, there were and are lots of cities around the world with greater claims to innocence than one that fell in lock step behind some inbred pansy who never did a lick of work in his life to attack without warning sleeping sailors across the sea, and to attack the civilians of Nanking and other Chinese cities.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki also performed a function we should be grateful for, of inoculating the superpowers against nuclear war, now for these 65 years. Much as the Napoleonic lesson of how horrible war was was forgotten by Europe by 1914, I fear that the lesson of how horrible nuclear war is has been lost on those who would be the new keepers of nuclear weapons in the 21st century.
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