He survived Hiroshima and went home — to Nagasaki

6 August 1945, Hiroshima. Tsutomu Yamaguchi, a 29-year-old naval engineer for Mitsubishi, is finishing a three-month business trip. At 8:15 he is about three kilometres from ground zero. The blast bursts his eardrums, burns his left side and leaves him unable to see for a while.

7 August. He sleeps in a shelter and goes looking for his two colleagues. He finds them alive.

8 August. He takes the train. Bandaged from the waist up, he travels the stretch that separates Hiroshima from his home in Nagasaki, where his wife Hisako and his son Katsutoshi are waiting.

9 August. He reports to the Mitsubishi office with his burns covered up. He is explaining to his supervisor that a single bomb wiped out an entire city, and his supervisor is telling him he is delirious, when at 11:02 the window turns white. Again about three kilometres away. Again left standing.

His wife and son survive too: they had gone out to find ointment for his burns.

For sixty years he is on record only as a Nagasaki survivor. Well into his nineties he asks to be recognised for Hiroshima too.

March 2009. Japan officially certifies him as a double hibakusha, a survivor of both bombs. Some 165 people are thought to have been in both cities that week; he is the only one the state recognised in writing for both.

4 January 2010. He dies of stomach cancer at 93, ten months after that document was signed.