Of course, it helped that Sayuri’s saga was made up. There may not be enough information out there to write a book about Yuki without filling in the cracks with fiction, but there can be no doubt that she led an interesting life. Morgan Oyuki created scandal and captured the headlines throughout her life and, incredibly, her presence alone may have saved Kyoto from the atomic bomb.

The Cure for a Broken Heart: 40,000 Yen

It was 1902, and George Morgan had just had his heart broken. His fiancee had split, so he took a trip to Japan to get over his feelings. George’s father was a rich man named George Morgan, and his mother was the sister of a considerably richer man, the famous banker J.P. Morgan. Yes, you may find it a bit creepy that both of his parents were born with the last name Morgan, but they were apparently unrelated. I’m skeptical.

Anyway, George was looking for something to cure his broken heart, and he found it: A Gion district geisha named Yuki Kato. He courted her for years, seeing her and asking her to marry him and visiting Kyoto as often as he could. She constantly refused, and something of a love triangle developed between her, George, and Yuki’s young lover Kawamura. The newspapers picked up on the story, and the scandal began.

Eventually, Kawamura moved away (maybe to avoid being drawn further into a scandalous story) and Yuki agreed to marry George Morgan. At this point, 40,000 yen, a tremendous amount of money back then, changed hands, and different stories give different reasons. Some say Yuki asked for the money in return for marriage, an old-school bride price situation, and others say the money was spent to release Yuki from her geisha contract. Whatever it was, George paid 40,000 yen or more to marry Yuki Kato, and this scandalous piece of news kept the Japanese newspapers talking for decades. January 20th, the anniversary of George Morgan and Yuki Kato’s marriage, is “Marry Into Money Day” to this day in Japan. It’s not a public holiday or anything, but it’s real.

With this marriage, the “Japanese Cinderella” story was born, and Yuki Kato became Morgan Oyuki. She left Japan with George, and visited America with him for a while. They found that the United States wasn’t quite ready to accept George’s young, recently geisha wife, so they left for France, where they would stay for the next decade.

In 1915, George Morgan was trying to return to France from America, as he’d done dozens of times. Due to the onset of World War I, this was no longer a simple process. To stay safe from German submarines, he took a ship to Gibraltar at the south tip of Spain, then had to travel overland the rest of the way to France. He would never make it. He died of a heart attack, and Morgan Oyuki was now a widow.

Mixed Narratives

At this point, the narratives split. Some accounts say that Oyuki left for New York, where three decades of Madame Butterfly performances had apparently now made the upper class more amenable to having a former geisha around. Wikipedia even claims that it was the Morgans who brought her there, but it cites a book that’s talking about something entirely different.

What’s wrong with that story? Oyuki hadn’t been welcome in New York about ten years earlier, and she probably knew English about as well as I know Tagalog. She learned French and spoke French so often that she was only an awkward Japanese speaker when she returned to Kyoto decades later.

Using Yuki’s letters and journals, Japanese writer Sumi Kosakai discovered what is probably the real story: Yuki stayed in France, living with a French ex-legionnaire who had been sending her love letters for some time. He would die a few decades later, and she would finally decide to return home.

Regardless of which story you believe, Oyuki returned to Kyoto in 1938, where she’d remain until her death in 1963. The Japanese media still wasn’t tired of talking about her, and every couple of years another novel or play based on her life would start the whole conversation over again. A 1947 issue of TIME Magazine details a particularly successful book about Oyuki which had been serialized over 260 installments in three different newspapers. Mademoiselle Yuki had never spoken with the author and refused to see him. The author had simply decided to fill in the cracks with fiction.

Box Office, Bombs

A movie director by the name of Masahiro Makino had a theory about Yuki. He said that it was his father, Shouzou Makino, who originally advised Yuki Kato to ask for an enormous amount of money to be wed. Makino says his father also met Yuki in France later on and tried to arrange a meeting between her and her former lover Kawamura, only to have Kawamura die along the way.

Masahiro Makino theorized that the Morgan family knew that Yuki had returned to Kyoto, and so they had the city stricken from the shortlist of potential atomic bomb targets (yes, this list definitely existed, and yes, Kyoto was originally on it).

It’s not by any means impossible that the Morgan family called off the dogs on Kyoto. If Lieutenant General Leslie Groves’ book about his experience leading the Manhattan Project is to be believed, it was Secretary of War Henry Stimson who adamantly took Kyoto off the bombing targets list. There have been a number of rumors as to why Stimson did this: Some say he thought it would be against the rules of war to bomb such a historic city. Some sources say Stimson rejected Kyoto because he had honeymooned there (embarrassingly, this may be the most well-supported story out there in historical sources).

But, if you’re willing to delve a little further into conspiracy theory, Stimson had also been a partner and close friend of J.P. Morgan’s personal attorney Elihu Root, and he was certainly well-acquainted with the surviving Morgan family. If the Morgans were aware that Oyuki was in Kyoto, which they probably were, and the Morgans still had the ear of Stimson, which they probably did, then Makino’s atomic bomb theory isn’t the wildest theory you’ll ever hear. But, to my knowledge, there’s no documentation or proof of this justification for saving Kyoto, and there’s been plenty written on the subject, even if it is a little inconclusive.

Finally, An Eyewitness Account

Despite all the scandal, the hoopla, and the “Japanese Cinderella” name tag, there is at least one source which claims Morgan Oyuki lived her last few decades simply, without the money and the drama associated with her earlier years. In a letter to TIME Magazine, a man who’d met Oyuki wrote in to protest at their typically scandal-filled report of her life:

Sir:

Your article about Mrs. George Morgan [TIME, Dec. 22] and the accompanying cut is both conceived and written in extraordinarily poor taste. Your willingness to accept the evidence of a cheap Japanese novelist is right in keeping with the tradition of yellow journalism.

At the request of her niece, Mrs. Sarah Morgan Gardner of Princeton, I located Mrs. Morgan in Kyoto in May of 1946 while serving in Japan with the Marine Corps. I found her through the St. Francis Xavier Church missionaries in that city, men who willingly testified to her devotion to the church and to the hardships she had suffered in Japan as the widow of an American. Mrs. Morgan herself, a charming elderly lady, who seemed more Occidental than Japanese, was overjoyed to hear news of her American relations, who are all devoted to her and have made every effort to see that she is taken care of. Far from being a rich woman, as intimated in your article, all her income is frozen in the United States.

Articles such as yours can do little else than make life more uncomfortable for people who are unable to answer them.

ROBERT W. LOCKE Princeton, N.J.

The TIME editor shrugged off the complaint with a bit of snark:

TIME trusts that its other readers were not equally offended by this story of Madame-Butterfly-with-a-difference. — ED.

To be fair, with the exception of suggesting that Yuki was still rich, TIME didn’t say much that wasn’t true.

Yuki Kato’s story has continued to inspire talk and rumors and novels and plays. Just last year, a new play called “Morgan O-Yuki: The Geisha of the Gilded Age” was put on at Ventfort Hall in Massachusetts, a mansion built by George Morgan’s parents. Fictionalized or not, her “Japanese Cinderella” story keeps echoing on through the decades, and who’s to say it ever has to stop?

Bonus Wallpapers!

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Sources:

• TIME Magazine, the 12/22/1947, 1/19/1948, and 5/31/1963 issues.
• Women of the Pleasure Quarters by Lesley Downer, pp. 186-192.
• The Asian Mystique: Dragon Ladies, Geisha Girls, and Our Fantasies of the Exotic Orient by Sheridan Prasso, pp. 48-9.
• Now It Can Be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project by Leslie Groves, pp. 275-6.
• History of Money and Banking in the United States: The Colonial Era to World War II by Murray N. Rothbard, p. 422.
• “What Future For Japan?”: U.S. Wartime Planning for the Postwar Era, 1942-1945 by Rudolf V.A. Janssens, p. 317.
• http://blog.goo.ne.jp/amachan_001/e/7f27c0a4e762b5f8416f1b77310fa70d
• http://www.joho-kyoto.or.jp/~wazaden/english/hito/morgan_e.html
• http://www.yorozubp.com/2011/2011/07/post-9.html
• http://uncoveringjapan.com/2013/09/25/good-eats-gogyo-kyoto/
• http://boardingarea.com/pointsmilesandmartinis/2013/09/how-a-ho…
• http://www.kyozei.or.jp/news/93/93-3.html
• http://www.nnh.to/01/20.html

I’m not going to go into the details of the bombings, the reasons, and why it happened. There are plenty of strong opinions on whether or not it was necessary. There are also many articles you can read about this to brush up on your history and form your own opinions. I do want to tell you a pretty amazing story, though, about one particular man who got hit by both blasts and survived to the ripe old age of 93 despite everything. To do that we should probably start with a paragraph or two regarding the radiation side of things.

Radiation From Nuclear Blasts

There was much short-term sickness from the radiation of the blasts. Tens of thousands of people died from this as well as various cancers in the years to follow. According to the Radiation Dose Reconstruction US Occupation Forces In Hiroshima Nagasaki paper (what a terrible name), of the 200,000ish current survivors (as of 2011) of the blast, approximately 1% of them are recognized for having illnesses caused by the radiation from the bombings.

Now, this number is of course probably lower than the actual one. There are going to be people who don’t want to ask for a handout. There will be others who don’t want the attention. It’s hard to know exactly how many people have had lasting effects from the radiation itself, but considering it’s been 67 years now they’re all going to be fairly old already, at least 67 years of age (if they were in their mother’s womb during the blast, for example), it really shows how tough we as a species can be.

Now, not to take away anything from any of these victims, but the human body is an amazing thing. It’s actually quite resilient to radiation. We evolved for millions of years in an environment where we were constantly being bombarded by radiations from the sun and other elements. In fact, you’re being bombarded by radiation just reading this article. Don’t worry, it’s a very safe amount, much safer than flying in an airplane, for example. This XKCD comic sums it up pretty nicely, I think, and really puts it all into perspective.

But, it’s not just our ability to take radiation. So long as we don’t receive a fatal dose of it our body can actually heal itself over time. Because radiation damages our DNA and the chemical bonds inside it definitely takes a while… but our body is constantly repairing solar radiation damage like this on a much smaller scale. If it didn’t, the sun would melt us all and we’d all live in caves lined with lead and look like AKB48 fans (just kidding AKB48 fans, just kidding… don’t be angry).

You got angry!

All that being said, though, it’s probably not a great thing to be hit by atomic bombs. That’s pretty obvious. While most radiation is fairly harmless to people in normal quantities, nuclear blasts are pretty full of radiation and a lot of people got caught up in it. So many people died from it and are still feeling the effects.

The Hibakusha: Caught In The Blast Radius

The Hibakusha (被爆者), literally “explosion affected people,” are those who are survivors of an atomic blast. As of 2011, 430,000 hibakusha have their names recorded on the memorials (they add new names every year on the anniversaries of the bombings). At the time of the bombing Hiroshima had approximately 350,000 people living in it. Nagasaki had an estimated 240,000.

If all these numbers are correct, then there are approximately 160,000 atomic bomb survivors still alive today which is a pretty large number, all things considered. Other sources say 200,000. Still, from horrible times always comes inspiring stories of human kindness and survival. Take Eizo Nomura, for example. He was the only 560 feet from ground zero (that’s 170m), yet he survived because he was in the basement of a reinforced, concrete building. Escaping through the fire and surviving the radiation sickness, he went on to live to his eighties. 560 feet, though. Can you imagine?

The most inspirational story, however, comes from Tsutomu Yamaguchi, the man who survived both nuclear blasts. Either he was the luckiest or unluckiest man alive. I’ll let you judge.

The Luckiest And/Or Unluckiest Man In History

In January 2009, Tsutomu Yamaguchi was the first person to be officially recognized as a double atomic bomb survivor. He is one of 165 presumed double bomb victims, though he’s the only official one. How’d this all happen? Of course, there’s a pretty good story that goes along with it:

When he was 29 years old, Yamaguchi worked at Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. He was in Hiroshima on a business trip when the atomic bomb dropped on August 6, 1945. He was a little less than two miles away from ground zero, getting burns and rupturing his eardrums. Compared to so many others, he was quite lucky. He tried to find the Hiroshima Mitsubishi Offices but it was just rubble. So then, he spent the night in a Hiroshima bomb shelter to try and figure out what to do next.

The next day, he followed a rumor that there were trains running in the outskirts of the city. Indeed they were, so he hopped on a train to Nagasaki. I think you know where this story is going. Arriving in Nagasaki, he found his wife and 2-year-old son. From there he made his way to the Mitsubishi office in Nagasaki and told his boss about the bomb in Hiroshima. It went something like this:

“You’re an engineer,” [the boss] barked. “Calculate it. How could one bomb…destroy a whole city?” Famous last words. [At that moment] a white light swelled inside the room. Heat prickled Yamaguchi’s skin, and he hit the deck of the ship engineering office. “I thought,” he later recalled, “the mushroom cloud followed me from Hiroshima.” (from The Violinist’s Thumb)

The thing is, the US wasn’t even planning on bombing Nagasaki. It was the secondary target. Weather made it so the primary target that day, Kokura, was unfeasible. Even Nagasaki barely happened because of cloud cover (they were ordered to do a visual drop) and things only cleared up at the last minute right before they’d have to leave because of fuel. So, it was essentially thanks to the weather than Yamaguchi got hit twice.

But, this isn’t so much the inspiring part. It’s what happened afterwards that’s interesting.

In the 1950s, Mr. and Mrs. Yamaguchi decided it was time to have children. They were feeling stronger by this time and were ready to try. At the time in history, it was thought that radiation damage would last a thousand years and be passed down from parent to child generation after generation. Considering Mrs. Yamaguchi was hit by one atomic bomb and Mr. Yamaguchi two, people probably thought their children would come out looking like monkeys. But, turns out all of that was wrong. There is no evidence of DNA damage to their children. Other children during this generation were fine as well (aka no epidemic of birth defects, cancers, and so on).

Mr. Yamaguchi himself died in January of 2010 at the age of 93. He died of stomach cancer, and while this cancer may have been caused by the radiation from the bombings, most would agree that 93 year olds tend to get cancer of some kind or another. His wife, Hisako, died before him of kidney and liver cancer at the age of 88. His son was not so lucky unfortunately, dying at the age of 59 of cancer, possibly due to radiation from the bomb. The two daughters are still alive and seem to be doing okay, though I suppose time will tell if they actually did receive any lasting effects.

There is one particular quote by Tsutomu Yamaguchi that stands out to me, though, and I’ll end the article with it.

“I could have died on either of those days,” he said. “Everything that follows is a bonus.” – Tsutomu Yamaguchi

Seriously, no complaining. About anything. You. Have. No. Reason. To. Complain. Ever. If you ever feel like your life sucks or that the world is out to get you, just think about Yamaguchi here.

So we salute you, Tsutomu Yamaguchi. You got hit by two atomic bombs, had a couple of kids despite what people thought at the time, and lived for over 9000 times the American life expectancy. You, sir, are a survivor, an inspiration, and the world’s toughest badass.

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Sources: NPR, Wikipedia: Tsutomu Yamaguchi, Wikipedia: Hibakusha, NY Times, Wikipedia: Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki