Note from Rowland: I don’t like many of Christopher Hitchens’ ideas or his crudity/irreverence, but I like his style! He’s nothing if not entertaining.

*****

O Lucky Man

By Christopher Hitchens Posted Monday, Jan. 11, 2010

“Oh God! There goes another sonofabitch.” —Ram Lutchman in Shiva Naipaul’s Fireflies

Last week brought us news of the death, at the very ripe and distinguished age of 93, of Tsutomu Yamaguchi. I had been following his career, if only from a distance, for some time. On Aug. 6, 1945, while visiting the city of Hiroshima on behalf of his employer, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Yamaguchi sustained serious upper-body burns when a U.S. Air Force B-29 bomber rather jauntily named the Enola Gay dropped the world’s first atomic weapon. At least 80,000 people were immediately immolated by the blast and the heat, with perhaps another 60,000 dying of their injuries in the aftermath. Yamaguchi managed to pass the first night in a shelter and then, evidently hoping for a safer and more hospitable environment, to make his painful way back to his hometown. Covering the intervening distance of 180 miles involved him in a journey of about two days, which gave him nice time to adopt an unusual vantage point for the next delivery of an atomic weapon on Nagasaki.

When hit in the throat by a Spanish fascist bullet that managed to bypass his spinal cord, his larynx, and his carotid artery, George Orwell grew tired of those who visited him in the hospital and congratulated him on how lucky he had been. If he was such a favorite of fortune, he ended up growling, then perhaps he would not have been shot in the neck in the first place. The scale of Yamaguchi’s experience was admittedly rather more impressive, but it does still compel the question: Was he the unluckiest man of the 20th century or the luckiest? Well, he was fortunate in one way, in that his gruesome employer, a subsidiary of the criminal Japanese military-industrial complex, could have made him a legitimate target at any time. He was less fortunate in having to campaign for years for the Japanese government to recognize his status as a dual survivor of the Hiroshima-Nagasaki attacks. He was fortunate in being employed after the war as a translator for the U.S. forces but tragically unfortunate in outliving his son, who was 6 months old at the time of the Nagasaki bomb and who died in 2005 from cancer that may well have been radiation-related. On the other hand, you might argue that it was a kindly fate that prevented Yamaguchi from having taken his wife and baby boy on that business trip to Hiroshima.

This is also one of those cases that demonstrate the absolute uselessness of official piety. A Christian or Muslim would more or less have to say, not least because of the apocalyptic events that seemed to dog Tsutomu Yamaguchi wherever he went, that he was in God’s hands. But this seems a bit callous in respect of the hundreds of thousands of other casualties (not to say somewhat hard on Yamaguchi’s own son). But mention of that son reminds us that Japanese and other forms of Buddhism—very much present as part of Emperor Hirohito’s imperial and military ideology (see Brian Daizen Victoria’s eye-opening book Zen at War)—would have coldly attributed all the deaths to actions unknowingly committed in the course of previous lives. I am not so sure that I can guess what an Orthodox Jewish rationalization would be, except that it would take numerous contradictory forms.

More… http://www.slate.com/id/2241080/

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