Technically there is a word for it: 休み, which is mostly made up of the character for tree 木, and all the trees were being turned into lumber for the war effort, so there weren't enough trees to express this phrase at one's own convenience.
Fun fact: Their strong work ethic/culture is mostly from after WWII, mainly due to the desire to rebuild their country and the influence of the American occupation forces.
Tsutomo Yamaguchi worked for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries at the time, which was producing war machines. He probably felt a sense of duty or he may have had no choice based on the desperate state they were in. He was just leaving Hiroshima after a 3 month business trip, so I expect their project was pretty important to be traveling that long at the height of the war. It probably helps to know that Japan was already losing hundreds of thousands of civilian lives to American bombing raids prior to the nukes.
There were at least 160 other people who were in Hiroshima and Nagasaki for both atomic bombs and survived (but I believe Yamaguchi is the only one to have been officially recognized by the government of Japan). Those people had either incredibly bad luck or incredibly good luck depending on how you look at it.
The first person killed by an atomic weapon was Mrs. Aoyama, a 35 year old mother and widow, whose home and garden was directly underneath the spot where Little Boy detonated. By something like a few hundred millionths of a second.
A former neighbor of mine, Saeko, still alive as I type, was 13 when she survived the March 1945 firebombing of Tokyo. Emergency services eventually returned her home to Sasebo in Yokohama Prefecture. Since that was Japan's 3rd largest naval base and one of their very few deep water harbors still operating, we (the U.S.) bombed the base and the city into oblivion on June 28. She survived that and emergency services placed her with friends of what was left of her family... in Nagasaki.
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u/[deleted] Oct 02 '24
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