Imagine you’re walking to work one day, and suddenly someone drops an atomic bomb on you. Now, imagine if that happened to you twice.
So, this guy’s name is Sato; he’s 29, he lives in Japan, he’s a naval engineer, he designs oil tanker ships. He’s a really smart guy, and Sato’s been working out of town for about 3 months because he’s been designing this new oil tanker. It’s his last day working away from home, and he is ready to leave that city. He just wants to get home so he can be with his wife and son.
So, anyway, he’s walking to work on this final day, and he’s already daydreaming about the day being over. Just as he’s reaching the shipyard, suddenly he hears the sound of an airplane buzzing overhead, which isn’t that uncommon, but this plane sounds different. So he looks up and he sees this is not a commercial plane; it’s a military plane flying over the city. As he’s staring at it, something drops out of the bottom of it. As this object falls to the ground, Sato is watching it, trying to figure out what it is.
That is when, suddenly a crazy bright flash fills the sky and it blinds him for a moment. In this split second, Sato, he’s disoriented, but he knows this bright flash is an explosion from a bomb, and light travels faster than sound. So he knows what’s coming next, and he immediately dives to the ground for cover. He rolls over into a ditch, covering his face with his hands and plugging his ears just in time to hear a massive C-boom. The force of this blast is so strong, it lifts him off the ground and flips him into the air, spinning him like a tornado. Then he slams to the ground and he is out.
When he regains consciousness, everything is dark and his ears are ringing. He immediately thinks, “Oh sh, I’m dead,” and it takes him a moment to realize he’s not. He’s alive, and he’s lying in a potato patch. He stands up and he can barely see through all the thick falling ash around him, but off in the distance, he sees there’s a huge mushroom cloud of fire rising into the sky. Because Sato was in Hiroshima when it was hit by the world’s first atomic bomb attack.
So he looks at himself and his face and his arms are all badly burned, and his eardrums are ruptured, and everything just hurts. He stumbles through the falling ash with very little visibility and makes his way to what is left of the shipyard where he works. There, he finds two of his co-workers, and they’re both also covered in ash and they’re both also badly burned. So the three of them look at each other and they’re like, “What do we do now?”
Now, here’s the thing: Japan is in the middle of World War II right now, and local governments and citizens have been constructing air raid shelters all around the country to protect people in the event of bombs being dropped. So the whole country has been prepared for war. The three men look all around and they find one of these air raid shelters.
They go there, and they’re inside the shelter, huddled up with some other survivors. It’s there that they hear their first bit of promising news: somehow, one of the local train stations is still operating and the trains are still running. So the three guys crash in that shelter for the night, and the next morning, Sato is like, “Hey, I need to get back home to my wife and kid.”
Now, unfortunately, his wife and kid are in another city, many hours away by train. So, Sato and his co-workers, all three, set out on foot, determined to make it to this train station. They walk all through the city, or what’s left of it, and it is an apocalyptic hellscape. Everything is either covered in ash or just straight up on fire, and most of the buildings are just completely decimated. But the absolute worst part is that the streets are littered with charred and melted corpses.
So, eventually, the three men get to a bridge and they need to cross this bridge to get to the train station. But, of course, this bridge is no longer standing. At this point, it’s just a pile of wreckage. But Sato and the other two can’t stop now; I mean, they’ve already gone this far. So they decide they have to wade into the river and swim across. But this river is filled with a layer of floating dead people, so they swim through it. Finally, they reach the train station, and Sato gets on a train to go back home.
This train is packed with other people, badly burned, who had also survived the bomb. This is an overnight trip, so the next morning, the train arrives at his stop. Sato gets off and goes straight to the hospital. The blackened burns on his face and his hands are so severe that his doctor doesn’t even recognize him. But he gets treatment; they bandage him all up, and he heads home to see his wife and son. When he gets home, he’s all burnt up and bandaged up, and his family doesn’t recognize him either. Regardless, he’s with his family and he’s alive and he’s safe.
Until the next morning, Sato wakes up. He’s a man who is dedicated to his job because, even though he’s severely injured and mentally traumatized, he gets ready and heads off to work at the home office in his city. As soon as he gets to work and his boss sees him all bandaged up, his boss is like, “What the hell happened to you?”
I mean, the boss had kind of heard there was an attack on Hiroshima, but he doesn’t believe Sato would have survived that. So the boss pulls him aside into a conference room and he’s like, “All right, buddy, tell me what the hell really happened.” Sato starts telling the story like, “Yeah, they dropped a bomb on me back in Hiroshima. It was crazy.”
Of course, the boss is like, “What? There is no way one bomb could destroy an entire city.” Famous last words. Because at that very moment—Pow!—a crazy bright flash fills the sky, the exact same flash Sato saw before. It blinds him for a moment, but he’s been through this and he knows what’s coming this time. He immediately dives directly to the floor. All the windows in the office shatter, and there’s debris and glass everywhere.
Everything in the office is destroyed and blown over. When Sato comes to, all of his bandages have been blown off, and everything around him is complete chaos. A second atomic bomb has just been dropped, and people are panicking and screaming. The whole city had just been destroyed, and even the building he’s in is now mostly a skeleton.
So, Sato checks himself, and strangely, he’s not any more injured than he already was. He’s relieved because he just survived two atomic bomb blasts—one in Hiroshima and another one 3 days later in Nagasaki. What are the odds? But then he remembers his wife and son back home—like, “Oh, did the bomb get them? Are they hurt?” So, Sato runs out of the building, or what’s left of it, and he runs as fast as he can through the falling ash.
He’s dodging fires left and right, trying to get home. Soon enough, he arrives at his house, but unfortunately, his home is no longer home because the whole thing has been reduced to just a pile of rubble. He is devastated. How could this be? What the hell happened to his wife and kid?
All right, so here’s what happened: Shortly before the bomb dropped, his wife decided, “You know, Sato is burned up really badly. I’m going to go to the store and get some ointment for when he gets home from work.” So she takes the son and goes to the store. That is when the bomb drops. But luckily, the store is much further away from the blast than the house was, so the wife and son end up only having minor injuries.
But if you think about it, if Sato hadn’t been injured in that first bomb, then his family may have never gone to the store, and they probably would have died in that second bomb. That’s crazy. But anyway, Sato does, of course, have radiation poisoning, but he does survive. He eventually goes on to become a public speaker, speaking out against the use of atomic weapons. He lived a long life after that; he lived to be 93, and then, sadly, he died of cancer, likely related to being in two atomic bomb blasts.
