29. The Double Nuked
Tsutomu Yamaguchi’s experience of surviving two atomic bombings might have been quite extraordinary, but as things turned it, while what had happened to him was rare, it was not unique. Incredibly, there were literally hundreds of people who were atomically bombed in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Although up to 200,000 people perished in the nuclear explosions and in their aftermaths, at least 200 survivors of the Hiroshima explosion had sought refuge in Nagasaki, only to face the same fate again, just a few days later.
In 2006, a documentary called Twice Survived: The Doubly Atomic Bombed of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was produced, and screened at the United Nations. The documentary’s producers had managed to track down 165 individuals who had been in Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945, when that city had been nuked, then ended up in Nagasaki when that city experienced the same fate three days later on the 9th. The Japanese, who coined the term hibakusha (“atomic bombed”) to describe the survivors of the atomic bombings, refer to those double survivors as the nijyuu hibakusha (“double atomic bombed”).