Tsutomu Yamaguchi – A man who survived both atomic bombings (2023)
biography.com
biography.com
Like with the Holocaust memorial and the Berlin Wall, these are things that have deeply affected me to see in person and comprehend what they represent, but I came away from a better person for it in the long-term—even if it broke me mentally at the time to be there and face it.
Nuclear weapons really disturb me on a whole other level I've yet to really comprehend, especially the idea that countries continue to build them. I worry about my own mental well-being with that, but feel that it's important to understand these things better and get beyond words on a printed page or digitised celluloid. Yes, these things are scary, we should be scared of them, they do scare me, just like the still-raw history of Berlin scared me. I think we run from the idea of feeling fear too often and choose to ignore it. People forget what these things do. People forget what people do to other people. We shouldn't be allowed to forget.
Before that visit I felt that I could detach myself emotionally from the reality of an event like that and make justifications for the continued existence of nuclear weapons for "bigger picture" reason. Now I find it impossible to make those kind of arguments. So I think I grew up a little that day and became more empathetic to others at an individual level.
It was honestly a bit like _being there_. Everything they have at that museum, if you have even a relatively vivid imagination, easily placed me in my mind's eye, like I was in Hiroshima for the aftermath.
Even with all this said, I'm still mostly speechless about everything I saw and read there.
I really recommend if you ever get to Japan to make some time to visit Hiroshima. Not even just for the memorial. It's actually quite a beautiful city.
(Why not? It's Japan's memorial to its war dead. All of them. Including the convicted war criminals. Visiting the shrine is seen, especially by Chinese and Koreans, as an endorsement of the war crimes. Every now and again a Japanese celebrity gets "cancelled" over this.)
It tells about the lifelong vaguely defined health impacts those exposed to the bomb had to live with, and how they tried to rebuild their lives after having truly lost everything and, for some of them, everyone.
People who have experienced one extremely unlikely event are more likely to experience it again, see Poisson clumping (although I know this type of event is not independently random). Ernest Hemingway and his wife survived two plane crashes a day apart.
https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/411018/poisson-dis...
This effect only shows up when you are looking at the probabilities of individual events- when you look at the aggregate results after a long time, they are totally random, and no more likely to occur next to one another. The exponential nature of the Poisson distribution does not cause any clumping.
If you survive a plane crash, you are still no more likely to survive another plane crash than a regular person, unless you do something else that makes it no longer independent, and therefore no longer following the same Poisson distribution as everyone else (e.g. you fly a lot).
However, assuming standard behavior, if you do get in a plane crash, you are more likely to get in your very next plane crash in the next year, than in year 10. However, a person never in a plane crash is also equally more likely to get in their first plane crash in the next year than 10 years out. And you are still just as likely to get in a plane crash in year 10, just not your next one.
Poisson clumping is just a result of human bias-sort of like an optical illusion. We incorrectly expect random things to be evenly spaced. Music players with random shuffle for example, will often seem to play the same song over and over, and will only feel 'random' when they are modified to be non-random such that they avoid playing the same song within some time interval.
After the start of the war in Ukraine, companies divided into three categories:
Good ones: They paid 3+ months' salaries in advance, covered the relocation costs for the entire family, and other expenses. For startups, these were donation-investments of $100k like in Awesonic (YC).
Ordinary ones: They paid nothing extra but provided some money for relocation until the next salary.
Bad ones: They paid nothing, no advance payment and demanded reports for working hours from bomb shelters during bombings.
I think such coincidences are not accidental, and this case with Tsutomu falls into either the 2nd or 3rd category. It's unclear how these coincidences would play out in peaceful life without war, but no one knew them except the management of the company where he worked.
Are you still in Kharkiv?
I otherwise liked the film, but I thought it was wrong to hide it from viewers. The bombing was the central plot point of the whole film. It would have been different if it was a new director, or surprise hit or something, but Nolan knew it would be seen by many millions of people.
It could have been shown without losing any narration context at all, in the scene where the protagonist is shown slides of the destruction scenes, and the camera only shows him looking away. The director didn't need to force the audience to look away too.
While I understand wanting that outside perspective included within Oppenheimer to more fully reflect the actual historic events, I recognize that Oppenheimer was a film telling the story of one man’s internal perspective on events, and so including scenes like you suggest would have diluted and weakened that central premise and through line.
That being said: I am biased in that I do not expect artistic works to reflect a complete reality, but just the reality they choose to explore — I can certainly understand different points of view, especially with regard to such a monumental and tragic real life event.
There comes a point where a director has to ask themselves if they're making entertainment for cash or poignant art. If the language was handled that sloppily, maybe that's the answer. It would be very easy to make a colossal fuck-up in presenting the horror of reality or be seen as cashing in on something absolutely grotesque.
No biography.com for you, New Zealand.
Welcome to Aotearoa, where history is doomed to be repeated!
That said also geoblocked here in Australia.
Although I’d gladly welcome our Kiwi friends into the EU.
But that still wouldn’t explain why the webpage isn’t available in New Zealand.
> Yamaguchi was born in Nagasaki, Japam, on March 16, 1916.
"Let's have a dot com and block large parts of the world from accessing it"
What a short and sad story.
If you want to read a novel from the perspective of someone experiencing the bombing of Hiroshima (based on historical records) I highly recommend Black Rain by Masuji Ibuse
Currently affecting Australian and New Zealand readers.
Still wounded and heavily bandaged, Yamaguchi returned to work on August 9, the day Nagasaki was bombed.
That is the greatest example of Japanese work ethic and the harsh expectations people can be put under.
I don't think Putin is doing this for his own personal gain. I think the majority of Russian leaders in Putin's place would probably have taken a similar course of action. Maybe not threatening nuclear war, but definitely having a similar Ukraine policy.
There's goodness too in the world, but reading this and other experiences of war, genocide, slavery, terror, crime et al—human beings can be unspeakably ugly in their actions.
But, but, but, I've seen the movie "Threads (1984)" so now I'm an expert and it's not possible.
Also how come all the children in the area can still speak, in "Threads" children mutate and can't speak like a reverse Spiderman.
This seems like Doomer-denial fake news, the movie Threads (1984) was the real one.
You can notice it in how people reason about 'war time manufacturing' and the like in the event of a Great war. Like there would be any factories running at all. Or logistics to support brigade manouvers. Or state sized organizations.
But perhaps that's how everybody felt and might be the reason why one could actually pull off such a fake story
An elderly survivor of one bomb carrying out identity theft in order to claim to have survived both bombs is another thing entirely.