Many people are unlucky, but few have the ill fortune of Tsutomu Yamaguchi. An engineer with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, he was dispatched to Hiroshima for three months in 1945. On the morning of 6 August, he was preparing to leave the city by train when he realised he had forgotten his personal seal. At 8.15am, as he rushed towards his office on the docks under a clear blue sky, the US Air Force B-29 Enola Gay dropped Little Boy, instantly annihilating vast swathes of the city. Yamaguchi was three kilometres away from the site of the explosion but was still badly burned and deafened in one ear. He eventually got on a train home to Nagasaki. Three days later, he reported for work at the Mitsubishi plant there. Despite his wounds, his boss could not believe that a single bomb had levelled a city. Yamaguchi was on the point of insisting that what he had said was true when there was a searing flash in the sky. The second atomic bomb, Fat Man, had detonated.

Miraculously, Yamaguchi not only survived both US atomic bombings, which killed over 210,000 people, but also lived to ninety-three. He spoke out against nuclear weapons at the UN and was the only officially recognised survivor of both attacks. ‘I could have died on either of those two days,’ Yamaguchi told Mainichi newspaper. ‘Everything that follows is a bonus.’ Over a hundred others also experienced both attacks. One such was Kenshi Hirata, a newlywed who survived the Hiroshima bombing but lost his wife. He brought her ashes home to her parents in Nagasaki and survived the second blast. 

Before he succumbed to stomach cancer in January 2010, Yamaguchi met Charles Pellegrino and the Avatar director, James Cameron, who wanted to make a film of his experiences. Pellegrino’s new book, Ghosts of Hiroshima, is the basis for that film, release date to be confirmed. It tells Yamaguchi’s extraordinary story,