If you ever feel like you’re having a bad day at work, consider Tsutomu Yamaguchi. He was an engineer for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries who was sent by his boss on a business trip to a nearby city. That city was Hiroshima, Japan. He was there on August 6th, 1945.
The blast didn’t kill him. He was a few kilometers from ground zero and survived the detonation of Little Boy, and was part of the evacuation of the city shortly after the blast. He took a train back to his headquarters office, whereupon his boss questioned him extensively about what he’d seen.
The headquarters office was in Nagasaki, Japan. It was August 9th, 1945. In the middle of telling the story of the Hiroshima blast, Fat Man detonated over the city.
(“It was just like that.”)
Personally, if I’d gotten nuked two times in three days, I’d have a hard time not thinking it was personal.
While at least a hundred survivors of Hiroshima were in Nagasaki at the time of the second bombing, Yamaguchi was the only officially-recognized two-time hibakusha, the term the Japanese use to describe those who survived a nuclear blast. Yamaguchi died in 2010 at the age of 1993.