U.S.A.
Everyone Else
Health
Science
Business
Technology
Sports
Video Games
Entertainment
Future
Humour
NEWS > EVERYONE ELSE > JAPANESE MAN SURVIVES HIROSHIMA AND NAGASAKI ONLY TO DIE OF OLD AGE
JAPANESE MAN SURVIVES HIROSHIMA AND NAGASAKI ONLY TO DIE OF OLD AGE
January 6 2010
Nagasaki, Japan – Nuclear power has cast a massive shadow over our species since its first devastating appearance in public sixty-five years ago. Since that time nuclear energy has allowed for breakthroughs in medical science and power generation 
amongst other things, but has also been the sabre rattled by oligarchs and terrorists as a way to try and garner real-world power. The impact of the splitting of the atom has been undeniable, a Pandora’s Box that will never again be shut.
Though all of our lives and futures have been irrevocably altered by the introduction of nuclear power there are some people whose lives have been more directly affected by its introduction. One man whose fate was undeniably altered by atomic energy and its first widespread appearance on the planet is Tsutomu Yamaguchi, a business man who was in Hiroshima the night the city was destroyed, survived, and then returned to his home town of Nagasaki just in time for the second detonation. His story has been told over and over as one of remarkable chance and luck, as well as a warning about the dangers of nuclear weapons. Now though, despite surviving those incredibly long odds, Yamaguchi has died of apparent old age-related ailments.
“I think it is a miracle. But having been granted this miracle it is my responsibility to pass on the truth to the people of the world. For the past 60 years survivors have declared the horror of the atomic bomb, but I can see hardly any improvement in the situation,” Yamaguchi told the Times Online in 2005. “I didn’t know what had happened. I think I fainted. When I opened my eyes everything was dark and I couldn’t see much. It was like the start of a film at the cinema, before the picture has begun when the blank frames are just flashing up. I thought I might have died but eventually the darkness cleared and I realised I was alive.”
Yamaguchi became a much regarded spokesperson on the dangers of nuclear weapons throughout his life, an activism that might be in jeopardy following his death.
“There’s really a double tragedy with the death of Yamaguchi. One is that his activism, an honest voice that had seen the destruction that nuclear weapons can cause, is 
gone forever. That voice, free of politics and partisanship, was perhaps the most important that has ever spoken on the issue of nuclear weapons,” said Scrape TV International analyst Gustav Hander. “The second tragedy is that after surviving such an unlikely set of circumstances he ended up dying anyway. I mean at 93 one would expect that a normal person wouldn’t have much life in him, but he survived two of the greatest losses of human life ever, and was exposed to incredible levels of radiation. If anyone was going to live forever, it had to be Tsutomu Yamaguchi but apparently that was not meant to be. A very sad story indeed.”
Yamaguchi never reported any superhuman abilities or mutations meaning that many of the superhero origin stories depicted in comic books are likely false.
“You don’t see Reed Richards or Peter Parker dying of old age which indicates that much of the storytelling depicted in those comic books is, in fact, largely based on a falsehood. What that also means is that deliberately exposing oneself to something like radiation likely won’t result in any kind of superpowers,” continued Hander. “Perhaps that is Yamaguchi’s final gift to the world. Now no young men or women will embrace the splitting of the atom in hopes that it will turn them into superheroes, a strong lesson for everyone to learn.”
Citing the upcoming barrage of superhero movies in the next few years, child rearing experts stated that this might have been the best time for Yamaguchi to die.
Emil Uliya, International Correspondent
NEWS > EVERYONE ELSE > JAPANESE MAN SURVIVES HIROSHIMA AND NAGASAKI ONLY TO DIE OF OLD AGE
LINK IT! http://scrapetv.com/News/News%20Pages/Everyone%20Else/pages-4/Japanese-man-survives-Hiroshima-and-Nagasaki-only-to-die-of-old-age-Scrape-TV-The-World-on-your-side.html |
TWEET IT! http://bit.ly/8eFKpe |
BOOKMARK IT!  
|
|---|
Scrape Store
