Lesson four zero hour : forty-three seconds over Hiroshima
On a brilliant summer’s morning in 1945, Kaz Tanaka looked up into the sky over Hiroshima and saw the beginning of the end of her world. She was 18 then, and her mind was wa filled with teenage things. She had wakened with a slight fever, just bothersome enough to keep her home from her job in a war plant. But she felt well enough to be up and about; her father had asked her to water a tree in front of their house. She ran across the courtyard and het herself out the front gate. A girlfriend was standing across the street. Kaz waved, and the two gossiping happily when they heard the drone of a B-29 bomber six miles up. It was a minute or so before 8:15.
The plane did not frighten kaz. For one thing, Hiroshima had gone almost untouched by the air war. For another, Kaz had been born in Califirnia, and although her fatehr had returned to japan while she was still in diapers, she liked to tell people she was the American in the family. She even felt a kind of distant kinship with the B-29s that flew regularly overhead, bound north for Tokyo and other targets. She waved at the plane. “ hi, angle!” she called.
A white spot appeared in the sky, was small and innocent-looking as a scrap of paper. It was falling away from the plane, drifting down toward them. The journey took 43 seconds.
The air exploded in blinding light and color, the rays shooting outward as in a child’d drawing of the sun, and Kaz was flung to the ground so violently that her two front teeth broke off; she had sunk into unconsciousness. Kaz’s father had been out back tending the vegetables, in his undershorts. When he came staggering out of the garden, blood was running from his nose and mouth. By the next day the exposed parts of his body would turn a chocolate brown. What had been the finest house in the neighborhood came crashing down.
Kaz had herself been hit in the back by the flying timber. She felt nothing. People were only shapes in dense, gray fog of dust and ash. A mushroom cloud towered seven miles over the remains of the city, the signature of a terrifying new age. Kaz never saw it. She was inside it.
Kaz tanaka had wakened in a frightening new world – a world whose dominant sound was a silence broken only by the cries of the dying. The very air seemed hostile, so thick with dust and ash that she could barely see. She found her girlfriend next to her.
“ What happened?” they both blurted at once. There were no answers; no one knew.