12 ms·
Tsutomu Yamaguchi – A man who survived both atomic bombings (2023)
- ithkuil 2y agoI always find it fascinating to hear stories like that and immediately feeling bad that my first thought is: what is the likelihood of this being an identity theft comlared with likelihood that after surviving two atomic bombs one lives up to 93 years?
- josephbidonski 2y ago[flagged]
- meitham 2y agoWhat doesn’t kill you makes you stronger
- lazide 2y agoAlternatively - if being nuked twice didn’t kill him, what else has a chance of working?
- dotancohen 2y agoStomach cancer apparently.
- lazide 2y agoBetrayed from the inside. Figures.
- layer8 2y agoYep, a lot of superheroes were created by radiation. Dropping atomic bombs actually strengthens the enemy. That’s the real reason why they stopped doing it.
- mensetmanusman 2y agoNot sure why the downvotes, there have been many fake survivor stories from WW2.
- ithkuil 2y agoAlso bear in mind that I literally say that I feel bad to even contemplate that possibility. It just feels wrong to doubt a person who tells you such tragedy. But perhaps that's how everybody felt and might be the reason why one could actually pull off such a fake story
- nerdponx 2y agoPulling off a completely fake story is one thing. An elderly survivor of one bomb carrying out identity theft in order to claim to have survived both bombs is another thing entirely.
- pcthrowaway 2y agoDid you even read the article though? I doubt his wife and child wouldn't have recognized if their father had died and someone else had assumed his identity
- JKCalhoun 2y agoHow haunting. I can't imagine having seen/survived one atomic bomb and then to see the same flash in Nagasaki. He must have thought the U.S. was going to sweep all of Japan. I think I'd head to the mountains.
- aaron695 2y agohttps://archive.is/IwLEw https://archive.is/IwLEw But, but, but, I've seen the movie "Threads (1984)" so now I'm an expert and it's not possible. Also how come all the children in the area can still speak, in "Threads" children mutate and can't speak like a reverse Spiderman. This seems like Doomer-denial fake news, the movie Threads (1984) was the real one.
- mango7283 2y agoI trust one recognises that a huge difference between a post WW2 and a Threads post Ww3 situation is that in the former the United States is at its peak and regearing its industry to rebuild Japan and Europe while in the latter the US is also a nuclear wasteland...
- rightbyte 2y agoThere seems to be this great dellusion being spread that it would not be such a big deal to not make people dissent. You can notice it in how people reason about 'war time manufacturing' and the like in the event of a Great war. Like there would be any factories running at all. Or logistics to support brigade manouvers. Or state sized organizations.
- rcxdude 2y agoYeah, the sheer difference in scale (both power and quantity of bombs) between the two makes it not particularly useful to compare the outcomes. Hopefully no-one loses sight of that.
- advael 2y agoIncredible that he lived so long despite the exposure
- userbinator 2y agoJapan consistently stays at or near the top of countries by life expectancy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe...
- frozenbit 2y agoIt’s been posted on HN before, but if this topic interests you, John Hersey’s famous reporting on the aftermath at Hiroshima (entitled “Hiroshima”) is worth reading. It’s essentially a short book, but the accounts laid out in the story make the impersonal tragedy into something that’s tangible. It should be required reading.
- jebarker 2y agoIn a similar vein, going to Hiroshima and the Peace Memorial Museum there was a life changing experience for me.
- caf 2y agoThere is currently an additional special exhibition on there as well, containing first-hand accounts from survivors who were high school students at the time.
- spike021 2y agoJust went there two weeks ago. The main exhibit was horrifying. The special exhibit you mention was even worse if that's possible. These kids just living their lives as written in their diaries and then the unthinkable happened to them.
- caf 2y agoYes. A lot of students were on outside working crews creating firebreaks, so the survivor accounts tended to be along the lines of "I was sick that day, I never saw my friends again".
- hammyhavoc 2y agoWould you mind talking about it a little? What you saw, how you felt, how you feel now—anything. Like with the Holocaust memorial and the Berlin Wall, these are things that have deeply affected me to see in person and comprehend what they represent, but I came away from a better person for it in the long-term—even if it broke me mentally at the time to be there and face it. Nuclear weapons really disturb me on a whole other level I've yet to really comprehend, especially the idea that countries continue to build them. I worry about my own mental well-being with that, but feel that it's important to understand these things better and get beyond words on a printed page or digitised celluloid. Yes, these things are scary, we should be scared of them, they do scare me, just like the still-raw history of Berlin scared me. I think we run from the idea of feeling fear too often and choose to ignore it. People forget what these things do. People forget what people do to other people. We shouldn't be allowed to forget.
- gnat 2y ago"Sorry, this content is not available in your region." No biography.com for you, New Zealand. Welcome to Aotearoa, where history is doomed to be repeated!
- Kodiack 2y agoI wonder what us kiwis did to deserve this.
- jaydeegee 2y agoYou guys haven't been great at sharing the Bledisloe Cup with us Aussies. That said also geoblocked here in Australia.
- MattGaiser 2y agoGDPR related perhaps? A lot of sites just blocked everyone outside USA/Canada due to that.
- ElFitz 2y agoGDPR doesn’t apply to New Zealand. Although I’d gladly welcome our Kiwi friends into the EU.
- HeatrayEnjoyer 2y agoGDPR is specifically applicable to EU citizens globally.
- ElFitz 2y agoYes, I simplified. But that still wouldn’t explain why the webpage isn’t available in New Zealand.
- averageRoyalty 2y agoSo then logically, wouldn't you geoblock earth for compliance reasons?
- doctorpangloss 2y agoHere's something even wilder: This guy comes up in GPT-4o queries all the time, because of how ridiculously overindexed it is on Hacker News.
- Kodiack 2y ago“Sorry, this content is not available in your region.” What a short and sad story.
- keyle 2y agoAlso the best way to survive atomic bombings. Don't be in the region.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- aussieguy1234 2y ago"Sorry, this content is not available in your region."
- zackfield 2y agoWhat an awful experience. I can't imagine going through something like that and remaining silent about it for decades. If you want to read a novel from the perspective of someone experiencing the bombing of Hiroshima (based on historical records) I highly recommend Black Rain by Masuji Ibuse
- bamboozled 2y agoI can imagine the staying silent part is dealing with trauma ? I have family who returned from the war and couldn't discuss it.
- zackfield 2y agoAbsolutely. I guess it's more fair for me to say I can't imagine what it's like to go through something so traumatic that I wouldn't talk about it for decades. Lucky to not have personally experienced anything like that
- bamboozled 2y agoReading this is truly harrowing. It makes me also realize how truly deplorable Putin is for constantly threatening to recreate such a situation for his own personal gain. Seems to me that people like him haven't read this persons account of what it was like. Still wounded and heavily bandaged, Yamaguchi returned to work on August 9, the day Nagasaki was bombed. That is the greatest example of Japanese work ethic and the harsh expectations people can be put under.
- layer8 2y agoIt might just be a great example of having to put food on the table in difficult times.
- bamboozled 2y agoJapan is the kind of country where you will put in a 60 hour work week and still be required to play ball for the company team on a Sunday.
- SSJPython 2y ago> It makes me also realize how truly deplorable Putin is for constantly threatening to recreate such a situation for his own personal gain. I don't think Putin is doing this for his own personal gain. I think the majority of Russian leaders in Putin's place would probably have taken a similar course of action. Maybe not threatening nuclear war, but definitely having a similar Ukraine policy.
- webwielder2 2y agoIs it a testament to the Japanese rail system that he was able to get to work in Nagasaki the next day after Hiroshima was f*cking nuked?
- acureau 2y agoI can't imagine showing up to work the next day at all, holy shit.
- cypherpunks01 2y agoWas anyone else bothered by how Oppenheimer declined to show even a single scene of the devastation that was caused by dropping nuclear weapons on Japan? I otherwise liked the film, but I thought it was wrong to hide it from viewers. The bombing was the central plot point of the whole film. It would have been different if it was a new director, or surprise hit or something, but Nolan knew it would be seen by many millions of people. It could have been shown without losing any narration context at all, in the scene where the protagonist is shown slides of the destruction scenes, and the camera only shows him looking away. The director didn't need to force the audience to look away too.
- 725686 2y agoI was so bored, that I wasn't bothered by it. I love Christopher Nolan's other movies though.
- xvedejas 2y agoNo, it didn't bother me; Oppenheimer himself never saw the devastation, he only could imagine it. It seems suiting for what the film was doing, to focus on his inner emotional state.
- cypherpunks01 2y agoHe was shown it, with slides in the debrief scene. He chose to look away, and that's all the camera shows.
- xvedejas 2y agoRight, I mean to say he didn't see it in high definition / in person, as it sounded like you were suggesting the movie should have done.
- cypherpunks01 2y agoYes, and I'm sure the director had that perspective too - that it would have been weird to show a cutaway scene across the world. I suppose just the lack of depicting any human consequences of the bombing was what irked me, I think it could have been done creatively if he wanted to.
- hammyhavoc 2y ago"Pure evil" is the only way I can describe what human beings do to each other. There's goodness too in the world, but reading this and other experiences of war, genocide, slavery, terror, crime et al—human beings can be unspeakably ugly in their actions.
- aussieguy1234 2y agoFor anyone who gets "Sorry, this content is not available in your region": https://archive.is/IwLEw https://archive.is/IwLEw Currently affecting Australian and New Zealand readers.
- _xnmw 2y agoReminds me of when the full-scale invasion started in Ukraine, I was in Kharkiv, and I met several people for whom "this was not their first war". The neighbour's family was from Nagorno-Karabakh, and had just fled the Armenia-Azerbaijan war that started a year earlier, the taxi driver was a Syrian refugee, and Kharkiv has many people from the Donbass region where the war started years before. People who have experienced one extremely unlikely event are more likely to experience it again, see Poisson clumping (although I know this type of event is not independently random). Ernest Hemingway and his wife survived two plane crashes a day apart.
- pacija 2y ago[flagged]
- weweersdfsd 2y agoWhat Russian fascists are doing in Ukraine has the same outcome as the atomic bombings in terms of death toll. It just takes longer.
- pacija 2y agoAh, the fascists. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yaroslav_Hunka_scandal https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yaroslav_Hunka_scandal
- _yb2s 2y agoThat isn’t true, and isn’t what poisson clumping is caused by. Totally random independent events clump together entirely by chance: having experienced one doesn’t increase or reduce the probability of it occurring again.
- _xnmw 2y agoI've had this discussion with a professional mathematician. As unintuitive as it does sound, actually random independent events are more likely to follow after it has happened. https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/411018/poisson-distribution-why-does-time-between-events-follow-an-exponential-distrib https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/411018/poisson-dis...