The twisted tale of two men tied together by Hiroshima and Nagasaki is an allegory for today’s world

Tsutomu Yamaguchi and Charles Donald Albury died within months of each other. The former lived to the ripe old age of 93, and passed away in January this year [2010]; the latter died in May 2009, at the age of 88. Neither of them were household names in their respective countries, yet they were noticed in obituaries scattered across newspapers. However much newspapers have changed over the last few decades, surrendering their place to television, cable, the Internet, and the mobile phone as sources of news, information, and commentary, the obituary pages have survived the relentless drive that has turned newspapers into merely another vehicle for advancing commercial interests.

I was again reminded of Yamaguchi, whose obituary I first encountered in The New York Times, in August when the bells tolled, as they do every August 6 and 9, in remembrance of the dead at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the mid-1960s, as a young boy living in Tokyo, I had no comprehension of what had transpired at Hiroshima. I wasn’t even aware that my father had visited Hiroshima, until, a few years later, when I was in my early teens, I chanced upon a book of photographs documenting the effects of the atomic bombing, evidently...

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