In the Wrong Place Twice

“…and turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah into ashes, condemned them to destruction, making them an example to those who afterward would live ungodly; and delivered righteous Lot, who was oppressed by the filthy conduct of the wicked (for that righteous man, dwelling among them, tormented his righteous soul from day to day by seeing and hearing their lawless deeds) – then the Lord knows how to deliver the godly out of temptations and to reserve the unjust under punishment for the day of judgment…” [2.Peter 2:6-9]

A 29-year-old engineer for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Tsutomu Yamaguchi, was on a business trip in Hiroshima, Japan, when the U.S. dropped the first atomic bomb. On the morning of August 6, 1945, Yamaguchi was stepping off a streetcar when the atomic device, nicknamed “Little Boy,” detonated above Hiroshima. Yamaguchi said he was less than two miles away from ground zero when he saw the blinding flash of light. Then his eardrums ruptured and his upper torso was burned by the blast that followed. The explosion destroyed most of the city’s buildings and killed 80,000 people. Yamaguchi spent a painful night in a bomb shelter and the following day returned to his hometown of Nagasaki, 200 miles away.

By August 9, Yamaguchi made his way to his Nagasaki office, where he told his boss about the terrible Hiroshima blast. This was precisely when the second bomb, known as “Fat Man,” was dropped on Nagasaki, killing 70,000 people there. Yamaguchi said, “Suddenly the same white light filled the room. I thought the mushroom cloud had followed me from Hiroshima. I could have easily died on either of those days.” Yamaguchi became the only official survivor of both atomic blasts to hit Japan in World War II.

Six days after the Nagasaki attack, Japan surrendered. Yamaguchi recovered from his wounds, went to work for the American occupation forces, became a teacher, and eventually returned to work at Mitsubishi. He was in good health for most of his life, said his daughter; despite the double radiation exposure, he lived to be 93 years old.

The Bible talks about other cities that were wiped out by fire from heaven, but the witnesses were not so fortunate. The people of Sodom and Gomorrah, having “given themselves over to sexual immorality and gone after strange flesh” (Jude 1:7), were completely destroyed. Sadly, they turned away from the only Source of life.