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Tsutomu Yamaguchi

Only two cities have ever been destroyed by atomic bombs. This man was in both of them.

Born in 1916, Tsutomu Yamaguchi was on a business trip to Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945. As he stepped off a tram an atomic bomb blew up less than two miles away, fucking shit up in an extraordinary way. Eardrums destroyed and temporarily blind, Yamaguchi scrambled to figure out just what the hell happened.

After spending a night in an air raid shelter, Yamaguchi decided Hiroshima probably wasn’t the safest place to conduct business, so he went home.

To Nagasaki.

A few days later, Yamaguchi was in the office of his supervisor, regaling him with the story of his near-miss with this mythical city-vaporizing super bomb. And just as he was trying to explain to his boss that it’s impossible to sell cars in a city that’s literally on fire, there was the distinct sound that few men on earth but Yamaguchi would have recognized: that of another atomic bomb, again detonating just two miles away.

Not only did Yamaguchi survive (while somehow not gaining any superpowers from the ordeal) but he’s still alive today, at the age of 93. Yamaguchi currently uses this tragedy to enlighten people on the dangers of atomic bombs. He has written books on his experience and is an anti-nuclear protester, though it seems like he’d be the one guy out there saying we shouldn’t worry about nukes because, really, you can just walk away from that shit.