After the blast knocked down the massive towers in central Seoul and the heavy steel-and-concrete structures fell, millions of sheets of paper from the office buildings now turned to rubble drifted up and wafted through what remained of the shattered city. Many survivors remembered the pieces of paper as a snowfall. Many others found a sort of solace in tracing the pieces of paper that they picked up that day and, for some strange reason they said, could not throw away. Each scrap of paper seemed to help connect many of the survivors to those others with whom they shared that terrible day.
It is not possible, however, that Im picked up a copy of the damage assessment distributed the night before. When the blast hit, General Jeong was in a car driving from the Central Government Complex to South Korea’s military headquarters—the blast wave flipped his car, then buried it beneath ten feet of rubble from the buildings it pushed over. When the general’s body was recovered, all six copies of the damage assessment were still locked in his briefcase. Im’s shock and confusion, it seems, had simply gotten the better of him.
Im then attempted to make his way on foot to the Central Government Complex a mile away, not realizing that it was totally destroyed. There was so much dust and ash in the air that he could barely see or breathe. As he picked his way through the wreckage, his progress slowed to a crawl as his coughing and choking got the better of him. A seemingly endless number of crushed or overturned cars littered the vast, indistinguishable landscape of rubble.
After a nuclear explosion in or near an urban area, collapsed buildings spread a debris field of rubble almost evenly across the blast zone. In Seoul, a modern city with towering skyscrapers, the debris field was more than twenty feet high in some places. Im found that he could not go more than a few hundred yards before he had to turn back.
When Im arrived back at the Blue House, he found it completely deserted. There were no security guards at any of the checkpoints. He was able to walk through the grounds, into the main building, and then down into the bunker without stopping once to show anyone a badge or let them inspect his briefcase. That’s convenient, he thought: in his haste after the blast, he had neglected to even dress himself, much less pick up his badge and briefcase. He was wearing nothing but the T-shirt and briefs in which he had fallen asleep. Both were soaked with his blood from the wounds he had sustained in the blast.
As Im entered the bunker, he found Admiral Um, sitting alone. Um had also attempted to go downtown after the blast, but he too had found his way blocked. When that failed, he thought perhaps he should make his way to the Crisis Room. The two of them sat there, alone in the bunker, with all the television screens off and the telephones dead.
Im asked if they could go someplace else, but the admiral had already considered that. “No car,” he told Im. His driver had fled after dropping him off. The two continued to sit there, with the admiral in his splendid uniform and the civilian in his bloodied underwear. “It was really quiet, and then I heard thunder,” Im recalled. “Admiral Um listened for a moment, then shook his head. He just said, ‘Artillery.’”
Kenichi Murakami was the chief of the Tokyo Fire Department. He was very proud of that fact. Of course, all around the world, young boys and girls dream of growing up to be firefighters. But in Japanese culture, firefighters are more romantic bandit than simple hero. The traditional ladder-wielding fireman depicted in Kabuki theater or in a woodblock print is more likely to be found brawling with sumo wrestlers than putting out fires.
The firemen of Edo—as Tokyo was called during the early nineteenth century—certainly had plenty of fires to fight. Traditional Japanese homes were built of wood and paper, and they were packed close together. Great fires ripped through the city on a regular basis—so often that people began to call the conflagrations edo no hana (“the flowers of Edo”). The cultural difference between firefighters in other parts of the world and the tobi (firefighters) of Edo can be explained by the simple fact that the latter did not fight fires with water; they had no water trucks or water pumps, just a few buckets and ladders. The primary method of controlling fires at the time was to knock down houses to make a firebreak, which allowed the fire to burn itself out without spreading. Thus, the fire brigades weren’t there to fight the fire but to fight any homeowner who might—understandably—resist seeing his home demolished.
A sort of protection racket arose around the firefighters. After all, it was far better if the tobi sacrificed a neighbor’s house to the firebreak rather than your own. Naturally, the Edo firemen became a tough lot—drinking, brawling, and covered in tattoos. Indeed, the distinctive tattoos that mark the Yakuza, today’s Japanese gangsters, are a relic of the Edo fire brigades.
Modern firefighters in Japan, of course, are a more professional group. The only real links between modern firefighters and the Edo firemen are the acrobatic teams that each department keeps; these are groups of skilled firemen who perform dangerous stunts atop ladders to thrill children. They are well educated and professional, respected for their bravery in the face of great danger. There are a number of women in their ranks. The model for the modern Japanese firefighter is less the Edo fire brigades than the professional firemen who helped battle the firebombing of Tokyo in the final months of World War II. On a single night in 1945, nearly sixteen square miles of the city burned in what was then the largest firestorm in history, and larger than the fire that would engulf Hiroshima a few months later.
Today Japanese people expect a lot from firefighters. And Murakami expected a lot of himself. Ordinarily, he might have been on his way to the office at 6:02 AM, even on a Sunday. After all, he had so many preparations to plan for overseeing the 2020 Summer Olympics, which were set to open in Tokyo in just 124 days. There was much to do. But he was tired. He simply needed a day off, one day when he was not headed into the office while everyone else slept.
Murakami was still in bed, then, when his cell phone buzzed.
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Emergency Alert
Missile Launch
2020/03/22 06:02
A missile was reportedly fired from North Korea. Please stay inside your building or evacuate to the basement.
(Ministry of Disaster Management)
Five minutes later, at 6:07, a nuclear weapon exploded with the force of 30 kilotons high above Japan’s Defense Ministry. This was twice the size of the bomb that leveled Hiroshima. A few minutes later, a second weapon exploded a mile to the north.
Murakami saw both flashes. He called his office, but got no answer.
If Murakami had been on his way to work, he probably would have perished while sitting in his car at an intersection. And had he survived the car journey, he probably would have been killed by the second blast, which severely damaged the Tokyo Fire Department headquarters less than two miles from ground zero. He was very lucky.
He got dressed in a hurry and went outside. As he tried to start his car, he briefly remembered someone telling him that an electromagnetic pulse—one of the side effects of a nuclear explosion—could damage a car’s electronics. But the car started. Murakami soon realized that the problem wasn’t going to be a dead car; rather, it was going to be the tens of thousands of working ones.
When Murakami got to the highway, he saw a massive traffic jam caused by people trying to flee Tokyo. He got out of his car. His phone was working, but there was still no answer at the Fire Department headquarters. He started to wonder whether there still was an office. He started calling around to other headquarters within the Fire Department. Murakami soon realized that no one in central Tokyo was answering.