…
the foreign ministry.
Shiggonorito was already at his desk, 62 years old, married to a German woman, and he had spent the last four months trying to convince the Soviet Union to mediate a negotiated peace with the Americans.
Morning on his desk was the latest cable from Ambassador Nao Take Sato in Moscow.
It was the seventh cable of its kind.
It contained the same information as the previous six.
Soviets were avoiding him.
Foreign Minister Molotov had refused to schedule a meeting.
Something was wrong.
Togo had begun to suspect that his diplomatic strategy was collapsing, but he did not yet know why.
Find out in 3 days.
When he found out, he would understand that everything he had worked for was already dead.
Deep beneath the Imperial Palace in the reinforced concrete bunker known as the Obo, Emperor Hirohito was reading a scientific paper on marine biology.
was 44 years old, small, soft-spoken, and by every account of those who knew him, more comfortable with microscopes than with generals.
His hobby was the classification of hydroszoa.
He had published papers under a pseudonym.
This morning, at 8:15 and 17 seconds, he was studying illustrations of jellyfish.
He did not look up when the flash occurred 500 km to the west.
Had no way of knowing.
None of them did.
600 m above the Shima Surgical Hospital in central Hiroshima, a device the size of a small car and containing 64 kg of enriched uranium reached the moment of its detonation.
Temperature at the point of the explosion rose to over 1 million° C.
1,000th of a second, a small piece of the surface of the sun existed in the sky over a Japanese city.
Everything within a radius of 1 12 km was vaporized.
Everything within a radius of 3 km was set on fire.
Human beings standing on bridges left only their shadows behind, burned into the stone by the light of a weapon that no Japanese soldier had ever imagined could exist.
The same moment at Ichigaya, the young signals officer completed his log entry and moved on to the next call.
8:16, 1 minute after the flash, the NHK radio station in Hiroshima went off the air in the middle of a broadcast.
The engineer at the Tokyo relay station made a note in his log.
He assumed it was a technical failure.
He redirected the signal.
At 8:20, the Sano railway line reported that all telegraph communication with Hiroshima station had ceased.
That assumed an air raid.
He sent a query to the military desk.
There was no answer because the military desk was also trying to contact Hiroshima.
At 8:30, an officer at the general staff office received the third failed communication report of the morning.
He was irritated.
Communications equipment was old and unreliable.
He sent a technician to check the cables.
The technician confirmed that everything on the Tokyo end was functioning normally.
Problem was on the Hiroshima end.
This was noted.
It was not yet considered alarming.
At 9:00, a report arrived at second general army liaison desk from the small railway station at Kaichi, 8 km east of Hiroshima.
Station master had written it himself in visible haste, and the paper was smeared with something that looked like ash, grabbed what he had seen.
He wrote that at 8:15 in the morning, a second sun had risen in the western sky.
He wrote that it was bigger than the first.
He wrote that his skin had felt as if it were burning even though he was standing inside his office.
He wrote that when the light faded, Hiroshima was no longer visible from his platform because a cloud had risen up where the city had been, and the cloud was shaped like a mushroom, and it was still rising as he wrote.
The officer who received this report read it twice.
Then he set it aside.
He would later testify that he had assumed the station master was in shock, that he had witnessed a large conventional raid and had lost his composure.
The officer crossed the report off his active list and filed it under items to be verified before escalation.
He did not pass it up the chain of command.
In the weeks and months to come, this decision would haunt him for the rest of his life.
10:00 in the morning, the pattern was becoming impossible to ignore.
Every attempt to reach Hiroshima had failed.
Not one line, every line.
Civilian exchanges, emergency frequencies, telegraph, radio.
The entire electromagnetic presence of Japan’s seventh largest city had ceased to exist.
It was as if the wires themselves had been cut at the same instant all across the country in a coordinated silence.
Senior officers began to gather in the war room, spread the maps on the long table.
They studied the ordinary geography of an ordinary city, spoke to each other in the practiced language of men who had been at war for a very long time, and who had learned to keep their voices level even when they did not understand what they were saying.
One of them suggested that a fuel depot had exploded.
Another suggested that the telephone exchange had suffered a direct hit.
Third suggested that this was psychological warfare, an American attempt to make the Japanese government believe that a disaster had occurred in order to force a premature capitulation.
None of them said the word that they were all thinking.
None of them said atomic.
None of them said impossible.
None of them said the thing that the Kitaii station master had already said in ink smeared with ash in a report that was sitting in a file drawer 6 meters from their table.
They ordered a reconnaissance flight.
They dispatched Major General Seo Arisuer of Army Intelligence to prepare a team for a flight south the following morning.
They agreed to meet again in the evening.
They went back to their offices.
They ate lunch.
Some of them slept for a few hours.
Outside in the ordinary streets of the ordinary capital, the ordinary life of a nation at war continued as it had continued for four long years.
Trains ran.
The rationing lines formed.
Children walked home from school with their small canvas satchels on their backs.
No one in Tokyo knew what had happened in Hiroshima that morning.
No one, that is, except one man.
At the domain news agency’s foreign monitoring desk in Aago, a chief editor named Saii Hagawa was working the overnight shift job to listen to foreign radio broadcasts and translate anything relevant for the government.
At 20 minutes past midnight, in the early hours of the 7th of August, he heard a broadcast originating from Washington.
It was the voice of an American announcer reading a statement that had been released hours earlier by President Truman.
Hagawa listened.
He wrote it down in Japanese, one sentence at a time.
He heard the word atomic.
He heard the phrase 2,000 times more powerful than the largest bomb ever used.
He heard the president say that if the leaders of Japan did not accept the terms of the Potam declaration, they should expect a reign of ruin from the air, the like of which had never been seen on this earth.
Hagawa put down his pencil.
His hand was shaking.
He picked up the telephone.
He called Chief Cabinet Secretary Hisatsun Sakumizu at his home.
He read him the translation.
Sakamizu was silent for a long time.
Then he asked Hagawa to read it again.
He listened a second time.
He asked one question.
Is this confirmed? Hagawa said that it had been broadcast on the American radio at the president’s direction and that it would soon be broadcast on every radio station in the world.
Zakamizu hung up the telephone.
He sat in his study in the dark for several minutes.
Then he began to make phone calls.
He called the prime minister.
He called the foreign minister.
He called the war minister.
Sakamizu reached war minister Anami.
At 2:00 in the morning, Anami was already awake.
He had been sitting at his desk reviewing plans for the coming battle of Kyushu.
Secretary announced the call.
Anime picked up the receiver.
He listened.
Sakamizu read him the translation.
An arami listened all the way through without interrupting, without speaking.
Sakamizu had finished.
There was a long silence.
Anami spoke six words.
They were the first words that any member of the Japanese Supreme Command spoke in response to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.
This is American propaganda, he said.
It cannot be true.
He put down the telephone.
He went back to his desk, picked up his pen.
He continued reviewing the plans for the battle of Kyushu as if nothing had changed, as if the world outside the window was still the world he had known when the sun went down.
Outside, over the mountains to the west, a column of black rain was falling on the ruins of a city that no longer existed.
And in Tokyo, the longest 16 hours in modern Japanese history were only just beginning.
3:00 in the morning on the 7th of August, the light in War Minister Anami’s study was still burning.
He had not slept.
He had not eaten.
He had spent the hours since Sakamizu’s phone call staring at the same page of the same operational document, reading the same sentence over and over and taking in none of it.
His mind was doing something that the minds of powerful men rarely allow themselves to do.
was refusing an instruction.
It was rejecting a report.
It was in the language of a soldier going absent without leave.
Nami was a man who had built his entire adult life on a single idea.
But the Empire of Japan could not be defeated as long as one Japanese man remained alive with a weapon in his hands.
He had said this in public.
He had said it in private.
He had said it to junior officers who worshiped him and to senior officers who considered him a fanatic.
He believed it as other men believed in the sunrise.
And now at 3:00 in the morning, he was being asked to believe something that could not coexist with that idea.
He set down his pen.
He walked to the window.
Outside in the pre-dawn dark, Tokyo was silent.
Sirens had not sounded.
The bombers had not come.
Was by the standards of the summer of 1945 a peaceful night.
He thought about the soldiers he had commanded and the ones he had sent to their deaths.
thought about the families of those soldiers.
He had a small photograph on his desk of his own son in uniform.
He looked at that photograph now.
He thought about what he would have to say to the mothers and fathers of the two million soldiers still under his command if he was the one who told them that the sacrifice of their sons had been for nothing.
He picked up the pen again.
He returned to the desk.
he wrote in the margin of the operational plan.
In his careful brushstroke, the words that would guide his decisions for the next 8 days.
War continues.
2 hours later, at 5:00 in the morning, the first light was beginning to touch the roof tiles of the capital.
And in the war room at Ichigaya, the senior officers were reassembling.
They had all been called back.
They had all read the Truman translation.
All had the same instinctive reaction as an army.
Cannot be true.
and they had all had in the hours since the same second thought.
It is General Yoshiro Umezu, the chief of the army general staff, arrived first, 63 years old, gaunt, disciplined, and considered, even by his own staff, to be a man without warmth.
He had commanded the Quantum army in Manuria.
He knew what a big army looked like.
He knew what real firepower could do.
He read the Truman statement one more time, set it down, and said what many of the men in the room were waiting to hear him say.
Single bomb cannot destroy a city.
This is impossible.
Others agreed.
They agreed because they wanted to agree.
Agreed.
Because to disagree would be to accept the end of everything they had spent their lives defending.
They ordered the reconnaissance flight to proceed immediately.
ordered Major General Seo Arisu to lead it in person, and they ordered that no word of the American broadcast be released to the public until the investigation was complete.
7 in the morning on the 7th of August, a twin engine transport plane took off from Tatiawa airfield on the outskirts of Tokyo bearing General Azizu and a small team of officers and scientific advisers.
Their destination was 500 km to the southwest.
Their orders were to determine what had happened to a city that had stopped answering the telephone.
Aru was 50 years old.
He was the head of army intelligence.
He had spent years as a military atache in Rome.
He spoke fluent Italian.
He was by the standards of the imperial general staff, an unusually cosmopolitan officer and an unusually rational one.
He did not believe in propaganda.
He did not believe in miracles.
He believed in what he could see and what he could measure.
First two hours of the flight, he saw nothing unusual.
Mountains passed beneath the wings.
The rice patties were green.
Fishing boats were out on the inland sea.
It was from the air the same country it had been the day before.
And then from a distance of 100 km, he saw the cloud still there.
19 hours after the detonation, the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima had not dissipated, red, and it had drifted and its color had changed from white to gray to a strange dark yellow.
It had not gone away, rose from the ruins of the city like a monument.
Tallest single object that anyone in Japan had ever seen.
Aru leaned forward against the window of the aircraft.
He did not speak.
He watched the cloud grow larger as they approached.
50 km, the smell began to reach the aircraft.
Faint at first, it was the smell of burning wood, which was familiar.
There was something else underneath it, something that none of the men on the plane had ever smelled before, and that they would spend the rest of their lives being unable to describe accurately.
The smell of what happens to a human being at a temperature that human beings are not built to survive.
30 km, the pilot began to lose altitude.
He was trying to reach Hiroshima’s airfield, but when they descended below 3,000 m, the smoke made it impossible to see the ground.
Pilot climbed again.
He circled.
He tried to approach from the east, from the west, from the south.
Every direction was the same.
City was covered in a haze that light could not penetrate.
They diverted to a small military airfield east of the city, roughly 15 km from ground zero.
It was intact, barely.
The runway had been damaged.
Windows of the control tower were gone, but it was operational.
Pilot landed.
Arisu stepped out of the aircraft onto the tarmac.
He was met by a small group of local officers who had been waiting for him.
Their uniforms were torn.
Their faces were dark with soot.
One of them saluted and when he raised his hand, Arisu saw that the man’s palm was blistered.
They led him to a small office in the terminal building.
The man was sitting behind the desk.
He rose when Arisu entered.
man was Field Marshal Shinraku Hattera.
He was 65 years old.
He was the commander of the second general army which was headquartered in Hiroshima.
He was by rank and by position the senior military officer in western Japan.
Also at that moment the highest ranking survivor of the atomic bombing.
Hatter was wearing a uniform that had been washed and pressed by his staff overnight, but there were still dark stains on the collar and at the cuffs that no amount of washing had been able to remove.
His face was cut in several places.
His left arm was in a sling.
He looked at Ariu and he did not smile.
He said one sentence to the general who had come to investigate.
There is nothing to report, he said.
There is nothing left.
Au was silent.
He looked at the older man for a long moment.
Then he asked to see the city.
They drove him toward the center in an open military truck.
The road had been cleared more or less of the largest debris.
Smaller debris, the countless small things that had been the possessions of ordinary people.
That morning they drove over.
There was no way to avoid it.
The truck moved slowly.
Arju sat in the passenger seat and looked.
He saw a street car.
It was sitting where it had stopped at 8:15 the previous morning.
Inside it, seated upright in their places, were the passengers had not moved.
They would never move.
The heat had done something to them that had preserved them in the positions they had held at the moment of the flash.
Aru looked at them and then he looked away.
He saw a bridge.
The bridge burned into the concrete railing was the shadow of a man.
The man was not there.
The shadow was.
It had the outline of a person leaning against the railing, perhaps reading a newspaper, perhaps waiting for a friend.
Whatever the person had been doing, they had been doing it at 8:15.
And now the person was gone, and the shadow remained, and it would remain there for years until the concrete itself was removed.
Saw a woman walking down the middle of the road.
She was carrying a child.
The child was not moving.
The woman was not looking at the child.
She was looking straight ahead.
When the truck passed her, she did not turn her head.
Ahu could not tell how old she was.
Her hair had been burned away.
Clothes had been fused to her skin.
She continued walking in the direction she had been walking when the truck arrived, and she would continue walking, and no one in the truck said anything.
Aizu took out his notebook.
He tried to write.
His hand would not obey him.
He put the notebook back.
He would tell his colleagues in the years that remained to him that he did not weep in Hiroshima.
He would say that weeping in Hiroshima would have been an insult to the dead.
He would say that the appropriate response to what he saw was silence.
And that silence was what he gave.
The same hour that Arisu was driving through the ruins 300 km to the northeast, another man was boarding a train at Tokyo station.
His name was Yoshio Nisha.
He was 55 years old.
He was Japan’s most distinguished nuclear physicist.
He had studied in Copenhagen under Neil’s Boore.
He had built Japan’s first cyclron.
For the last four years, he had been the head of a small, secret, desperately underfunded project inside the Reichen Research Institute, the aim of which was to build for Japan the very weapon that had just been used against a Japanese city.
Project was called NIGO.
It had employed at its peak fewer than 100 people.
It had been given a budget that would not have paid for a single wing of the Manhattan project.
uranium enrichment facility had been a wooden shed in the countryside.
In April of 1945, an American incendiary raid on Tokyo had burned Nisha’s laboratory to the ground and with it his separation apparatus and with it whatever remained of the project’s slim chance of success.
He had not slept well since.
