He needed to set up a temporary command post. The Olympic Security Command Center (OSCC) was now largely functional and outside of central Tokyo, far from the blast zone. But it was still quite a distance away. Fortunately, the Tokyo Fire Department had a few helicopters to rescue people from burning buildings. The fire chief managed to get in touch with one of his fire stations where a helicopter was based and asked for a ride.
In the helicopter, Murakami had a commanding view of Tokyo. He looked over the endless city and saw that the center of Tokyo around where the Defense Ministry had been was completely leveled. The blasts had knocked down all the buildings for more than a mile, and further out it had stripped others to their bare steel frames. Those bare frames stood like skeletons around the blast zone, keeping watch over the smoldering ruins. And then Murakami noticed what worried him most: fires were breaking out all around the city.
Nuclear explosions release an enormous amount of heat, setting fires that, in many cases, can do far more damage than the blast from the explosion. But fires are hard to predict. Murakami’s fire department had trained for all kinds of disasters, including a nuclear explosion. He was prepared for fires to break out in residential areas and at low-rise public buildings constructed of wood. Most of the technical literature works from the assumption that modern cities, built of steel and concrete, are relatively resistant to fire. But the reality can be far more complicated—as Murakami learned when he arrived at the OSCC.
In recent years, Murakami now recalled, there had been a spate of high-rise fires, many of which resulted from the flammable cladding on the outside of the buildings that has become popular because it both improves the appearance of a building and increases its energy efficiency. The Grenfell Tower in London that killed seventy-one people in 2017 was the most famous case, but there had been similar fires in Australia and South Korea. One survey of Melbourne concluded that more than half of the 170 buildings surveyed were a fire risk. In energy-conscious Japan, such cladding was also commonplace.
Now Murakami was witnessing the same effect across his own city: many tall buildings were on fire. These structures might well have been perfectly safe in normal conditions, but the towers were simply not designed to withstand the intense heat of a nuclear explosion. To make matters worse, the widespread loss of power had led to sharply reduced water pressure throughout Tokyo, disabling many sprinkler systems. Fighting fires in high-rise buildings is one of the most demanding tasks any firefighter will ever face. Murakami was facing dozens of fires in tall buildings spread around the disaster area.
Inside the OSCC, Murakami worked hard to coordinate the groups of firefighters throughout the city, but the fires erupted so quickly that he found it impossible to keep up. Told that a building was on fire one moment, he was often informed the next that it was hopeless and out of control—all before he could assign firefighters to deal with the problem.
In the midst of this maelstrom, he received another text:
⚠
Emergency Alert
Missile Launch
2020/03/22 07:23
A missile was reportedly fired from North Korea. Please stay inside your building or evacuate to the basement.
(Ministry of Disaster Management)
Mildly surprised to see that the emergency alert system was still functioning, Murakami felt his spirits lift a bit, before the weight of his situation settled over him once more. He had a responsibility to do his part, even if his efforts seemed to be futile. He decided not to seek shelter, but to keep working. How can I hide underground when my firefighters are out there? he later recalled thinking.
The next missile fired was not a nuclear one. North Korea had a small stockpile of nuclear weapons, most of which had been fired in the opening attack. Over the next twenty-four hours, Murakami’s phone would continue to receive missile alerts. Eventually, he remembered something he had read about World War II. During the war, after Allied bombers dropped incendiaries to set fire to German and Japanese cities, the Allies would launch a second wave of bombers with explosives—to kill the firefighters attempting to put out the fires. In Syria, the same kind of strikes were called “double taps”—one strike against a target, then a second strike to kill the first responders. As his firefighters were trying desperately to extinguish the blazes breaking out all over Tokyo, Murakami realized that the North Koreans were trying to stop them. They were trying to kill his firefighters so that Tokyo would burn.
These follow-on missiles, armed with conventional explosives, were frightening, but far too inaccurate to really hamper the firefighters. Soon enough, the strikes dwindled. Over the course of the first day, the firefighters responded to warnings of incoming missiles by calling the warheads sumo-tori—a sly reference to the sumo wrestlers who had brawled with their predecessors of yesteryear.
As the day dragged on, the fires burning throughout Tokyo began to draw air in toward the city center. March is the windiest month in Tokyo, and so, at first, Murakami merely worried that the stiff breeze might fan the flames at the individual fire sites, making the job tougher and more dangerous. But as the force of the winds continued to climb, his heart sank. It wasn’t a March wind at all. In fact, the morning had been perfectly calm.
The fires were growing in strength and starting to make their own weather. This was the beginning of a firestorm.
Not every nuclear explosion unleashes a firestorm. In August 1945, Hiroshima burned in one, but Nagasaki, nestled among the mountains, did not. Predicting whether a firestorm will or will not develop is nearly impossible—it’s so difficult, in fact, that the US military has never even attempted to calculate deaths or damage from fire in its models of nuclear war. Fire is simply too unpredictable, too wild, for neat and tidy calculations.
As the wind speed topped 70 miles per hour—the same as a typhoon—Murakami realized that the unthinkable was happening. Tokyo was now a city of metal and glass, not wood and paper. But it would burn just as it did during the Second World War when the Allies dropped incendiary bombs on it.
Modern firefighters, even with all their equipment and technology, are as helpless in the face of a firestorm as an Edo fireman with his buckets and ladders. Murakami understood that he could not put out a fire of this size and scale. He would have to treat it like a wildfire, containing it until it burned itself out.
What he needed to make this tactic work were firebreaks. But how to make firebreaks in a city? The firemen of Edo might knock down a house made of wood and paper with their hands, but modern steel-and-concrete structures? Murakami took out a map and began to locate the natural firebreaks—rivers, open spaces, hillsides—throughout Tokyo. He began to order the crews to retreat to these points, leaving much of central Tokyo to burn. “I thought about those old guys, the ones who fought fires with not much more than their ladders,” he said later. “I felt totally helpless. Maybe firefighting today isn’t so different after all.”
Oh Soo-hyun shared a name with a doctor in a Korean soap opera. She was a doctor too, though beyond that single point of comparison, she was completely different from her fictional counterpart. The television Oh was rich and sheltered. The emergency room doctor in Busan, South Korea, was competent and thoroughly middle-class. The television Oh had a father who ran the hospital. The doctor in Busan had only her mother, who lived in a small hamlet two hours outside the city.