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Some perspective for weary travelers If you've lost your luggage, checked into a shoebox-sized business hotel that reeks of smoke, and had your stomach pumped after eating some bad eel, you still haven't had a worse trip than Tsutomu Yamaguchi did. In August 1945, Yamaguchi was sent to Hiroshima on a business trip. With the job done, his co-workers left, but Yamaguchi realized that he had forgotten his personal seal for signing official documents, so he headed back into town to pick it up. That's when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Badly burned, deaf, and partially blind, he spent a night in the ruins of the city, and then found a railway station on the western edge of the city that was back in operation. He managed to catch a train home to Nagasaki, where ? as Yamaguchi explained to his disbelieving boss what had happened in Hiroshima ? the second atomic bomb was dropped. In 2009, the Japanese government certified the still-living Tsutomu Yamaguchi as the first known person to have been at ground zero of both atomic blasts. A year later, Yamaguchi passed away from stomach cancer at the age of 93. |