[music playing]
WILLIAM SHATNER: Hiroshima, Japan, August 6, 1945, 8:15 AM.
29-year-old engineer Tsutomu Yamaguchi
is walking to work when a blinding flash, brighter
than the sun, fills the sky.
[intense music]
He doesn't know it yet, but the world's first atomic bomb
has just exploded over the city with the force of 15,000 tons
of TNT, creating a massive shockwave that disintegrates
everything in its path.
MICHIO KAKU: Instinctively, Tsutomu Yamaguchi
raced into a ditch as an atomic fireball began to pulverize
almost everything in sight, like a gigantic hand
from outer space coming down, crushing everything,
blowing all structures away.
WILLIAM SHATNER: The bomb that exploded over
Hiroshima was the most destructive force
ever unleashed in history.
80,000 people died instantly as temperatures approaching
the surface of the sun vaporized their bodies
and bathed the city in lethal radiation.
But astoundingly, despite being less
than 2 miles from ground zero, Mr. Yamaguchi somehow survived.
MICHIO KAKU: There is ash falling from the sky.
And he realizes that his eardrums have been shattered
and that he was burned by the enormous amount of heat
that came out of the blast.
He got 1,000 times the dose of radiation
that we experience in one year simply by walking
on the surface of the Earth.
Anyone who was in that type of a radius from an atomic bomb
would experience anywhere from 95% to 98% chance of dying
due to all the different dimensions
of injury that are possible.
WILLIAM SHATNER: Tsutomu Yamaguchi survival
of the nuclear devastation at Hiroshima
is almost impossible to fathom.
But what's even more unbelievable
is that just three days later on August 9, 1945,
he did it again.
MICHIO KAKU: Yamaguchi is from Nagasaki.
After being atomic bombed, he wants
to go back to meet his family.
So he gets on a train, travels 186 miles from Hiroshima
to Nagasaki.
And then for a second time, he sees
this flash of light coming from an atomic detonation,
the Nagasaki bomb.
And there's a repeat of the tragedy.
WILLIAM SHATNER: More than 75,000 people
died in the Nagasaki bombing.
Yet once again, Tsutomu Yamaguchi
walked away from a deadly nuclear blast
with only minor injuries.
Even more incredibly, despite being exposed to a lethal dose
of radiation for the second time in three days,
he lived an otherwise healthy life before finally
dying at the age of 93.
Those two quick doses of radiation
within three days of each other is absolutely terrible.
You would think it would have destroyed
his body, his internal organs.
But somehow this man had a system
that was able to withstand it.
And so it shows that there's a lot more going on
with our bodies and they're capable of a lot more
than we may realize.
It just takes these extraordinary circumstances
to show us that.
From a medical perspective, it defies all of the science
that we know.
There has to be another facet, like his will to live.
And who knows, maybe that element
of will that can't be quantified by science
had something to do with it.
WILLIAM SHATNER: Tsutomu Yamaguchi's survival
would appear to defy all logic, which
is perhaps why some people attribute it to fate.
RAMANI DURVASULA: When we're thinking about survival,
fate and destiny are so interesting because they're
beliefs that have been held by societies as long as we've
had sort of recorded history.
We can look at the ancient Greeks, where
a lot of the philosophies were really about the gods
on Mount Olympus sort of rolling the dice
and determining the fates for the lowly humans underneath.
We could look at Hinduism, where the concept of karma
has often been sort of conflated with a model of fate.
And I think that makes sense, given
how people who survive disasters of any kind and really by all
odds should have died.
It's really a miracle watching them
walk out of these situations.