Stories and News No. 84
The Story:
Tsutomu Yamaguchi was born on March 16, 1916 in Japan, in Nagasaki, a beautiful city lying on two valleys offered for free from two rivers.
At the time Harry Truman was thirty years old, but he still did not know that he would try to kill him.
Harry was a man like many others in the United States, those who voluntarily joined the war, really convinced that it was a way to honor the country.
An ordinary person, until he met Tom Pendergast, the politician and his life changed forever.
In the same time Tsutomu was just a boy, a boy who was happy to live in a city overlooking the sea. His mother almost every day told him these words: smile, my son, because not everyone can sleep with the voice of the sea in his ears...
Many would have repeated that it was common in Japan, but he take the advice speechless, because he would have loved Nagasaki even if it were on the further away from the water verge in the world
Why? Simply: because it was his city.
In 1934 the Democratic Party made Harry a senator and in 1941, the year Japan bombed Pearl Arbor, he was re-elected for being an honest man.
An honest politician...
It is a very valuable thing, then as now, everywhere, don’t you think?
By the way, Tsutomu had taken a different road.
He wanted to be an engineer, he whish to design and build, he had always wanted since he was a teenager, because he sensed that it could be a perfect way to pay tribute to his homeland, a fearless land, able to proudly grow in the midst of volcanoes and the sea waves, knowing that true courage is to create, never to destroy.
1945 was a memorable year for Harry.
He became vice president of the United States but he had no time to rejoice for that incredible milestone because a few months later he saw that word vice disappear to get on the top of his country.
He said he felt as if the sky had fallen on him.
He didn’t imagine how those words could have been literally understood because of him.
After less than four months of presidency, the most powerful man in the world condemned to death about two hundred thousand human beings, justifying his decision with these words: we did it to save the lives of thousands and thousands of young Americans...
On the morning of August 6, ever in 1945, Tsutomu was among those unfortunate coming to an end.
He was on a tram, quiet, watching the streets of Hiroshima and the life that flowed unwarily. A beautiful girl on a bicycle, a stray dog-eyed melancholy, a frown man who was returning home to forever leave his wife and some children all going happy to school, except the little girl with red eyes.
Why is she sad? That is what Tsutomu wondered while he descended from the tram.
Nothing serious, it was only the consequence of a trivial allergy.
And the sky fell on them…
Truman had won, Japan had surrendered, Victoria and defeat, Mors tua vita mea.
The winner is always right, you know, and he can do what he wants.
For example he may send again his people to war, as Truman did in 1950 in Korea, against the advice of the UN Security Council.
Three years later, Harry left the presidency and for the rest of his life he continued to believe that the path of peace was paved with threatening to explode at any moment atoms, if proof were needed.
He ended his life trip in 1972, the day after Christmas.
In 1945 he and his country had won, and now Harry was dead.
In 1945, Japan had lost.
Yet life is strange, because when his murderer breathed his last breath, Tsutomu Yamaguchi, an engineer who loved his city, one of the men who had the misfortune of knowing the truth about the peace of atoms, didn’t know that it would have still lived more than thirty years.
Thirty years telling another story...
Stories and news: “invented” Stories, fruit of my imagination, inspired by “true” media News.
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