Where they and their ancestors had once lived had, during the twelve years from 1946 to 1958, seen the explosion of twenty-three atomic bombs, with the combined force of forty-two million tons of conventional explosives. Everything the islanders had known had been obliterated: their homes and boats destroyed, their soil and the seawater contaminated, and their lives changed and spoiled forever. And for what purpose? To what end?
The blue Pacific now churns ceaselessly each present day along Bikini Atoll’s quite deserted coral beaches. The palm trees lean into the breeze, unclimbed. There are no sails out in the lagoon, no sounds of chanting as the fishermen pull in their nets, no villagers gathering to chatter under the coconut groves. Bikini is today a place of a strangely deadened silence—a terrible, unnatural emptiness that compels any visitor to turn somewhere, to try to face the eternally invisible perpetrators of all this, and demand of no one and of everyone: just why?
1 Interestingly, the 1899 treaty never specifically mentioned the Marshall Islands, leaving some to argue about their legal status still today—arguments that, considering the amount of money involved for aid and compensation, are of more than mere historic interest.
2 Or, according to one Internet source, Waffle Nose. He had a remarkable similarity to the actor Karl Malden.
3 This evacuation was to be echoed two decades later, in the Indian Ocean, when the Pentagon wanted to use the British colonial possession Diego Garcia as a military base. Denis (later Lord) Greenhill wrote in an infamous memo that there were just “a few Tarzans or Men Fridays” living there. In fact, a vibrant community of more than two thousand people was shipped off against its will to Mauritius. It has been fighting for compensation ever since.
4 A number of weapons were also exploded on the nearby atoll of Enewetak, an atoll that suffered similarly but that for many reasons has never attracted quite the same attention. “A Pacific Isle,” a New York Times headline read in 2014, “Radioactive and Forgotten.”
5 The countdown and explosion were relayed by radio around the country and world. The BBC broadcast the test on the Light Programme, a station usually reserved for music and soap operas, but it was late at night in Britain, and static interference made the entire event well-nigh inaudible, with only “one word in ten” able to be understood.
6 When the German crew finally left their ship at Panama, the American sailors discovered they couldn’t work the Prinz Eugen’s boilers. Tugs had to be ordered, and the eighteen-thousand-ton ship had to be towed across the Pacific, bound for this vain attempt to destroy her.
7 The first true hydrogen bomb, code-named Ivy Mike, had been successfully detonated on the nearby Enewetak Atoll sixteen months before. But the hydrogen in that experiment had to be supercooled, making the combined bomb—it had to have a Nagasaki-like Fat Man bomb as a trigger—truly massive. It weighed sixty-two tons, so it was far too big to be used as a weapon. Castle Bravo, by contrast, used solid fuels and weighed in at only ten tons, and the success of the test convinced both the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Air Force that H-bombs could now be made in sizes that could be delivered by aircraft or missiles.
8 The very first Soviet A-bomb had been exploded in 1949, more than four years after the first U.S. test in New Mexico. But Moscow’s first thermonuclear H-bomb test came in August 1953, just nine months after the United States’ Ivy Mike fusion bomb on Enewetak.
9 Whether this was a deliberate employment of economy with the truth can never be known. But it is worth remembering that Strauss famously and wrongly predicted that nuclear fusion would allow for the generation of electricity “too cheap to meter,” and that he was also largely responsible for destroying the postwar career of the Manhattan Project’s leader, J. Robert Oppenheimer, suspecting him, also quite wrongly, of being a Soviet spy.
10 The man who licked the falling dust lived into his eighties, and opened a dry-cleaning business, while another opened a tofu restaurant. All received the 2015 equivalent of five thousand dollars in compensation, once the United States formally took responsibility. The ship was hauled out of the water and now stands in a museum—not as a local monument in Yaizu, but in Tokyo, where she still gets national attention.
[Marzolino/Shutterstock, Inc.]
Chapter 2
MR. IBUKA’S RADIO REVOLUTION
This is not the age of pamphleteers. It is the age of the engineers. The spark-gap is mightier than the pen.
—LANCELOT HOGBEN, Science for the Citizen, 1938
It was piercingly hot in Canada in the late summer of 1955—so hot, the newspapers said, that apples in Ontario were baking on the trees. Indoors it was sweltering, and those who came home from work and wished to listen to the evening news or learn how their local lacrosse teams were faring found it necessary to keep their windows open, crank up the radio’s volume, sit out on the stoop or the lawn, and hope the passing traffic didn’t drown out the broadcast.
But those few who had passed by electrical stores in downtown Winnipeg and Edmonton, in Toronto and Montréal and Vancouver—most especially Vancouver, which at the time had a sizable Japanese population, who had some prior knowledge about such things—would have noticed on sale that month a small boxlike device made from greenish-brown plastic that, all who saw it swiftly realized, brought an answer to their summertime prayers.
It was a radio set no bigger than your hand, with no wires connecting it to anything. Until August 8, when this device first went on sale, most radio sets had been pieces of furniture. They were, by and large, behemoths made of walnut veneer that needed to be dusted and polished, and that more often than not provided a resting plinth for potted plants. But this little box was different. It wasn’t furniture at all. It ran off batteries and didn’t have to be connected to the wall. It was lightweight, didn’t need time to warm up, and in fact didn’t get warm; it emitted sound the moment you turned it on, and it could go anywhere—certainly well beyond the oppressive heat of an August living room. You could use it outside, under the shade of a tree, in the cool beside the fine spray from the sprinkler. It was so neat and tidy, with its tiny plastic feetlets, that you could set it down on a table in the yard or on the lawn itself, or on a table on the porch—or it could be carried to and fro as you wished, perhaps as you went to the icebox to fetch another bottle of Molson.
It was a pretty little thing, very modern, very midcentury. Most of it seemed to be a loudspeaker, with a grille and scores of tiny perforations. There was a small red and black wheel on the side that turned it on and off, and another to adjust the volume. On the front right-hand side was a dial and a knurled, revolvable disk that allowed you to change from one CBC station to another. On this disk were words, most probably unrecognizable to all but the immigrant Japanese: “Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo,” which in English meant “Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Company.”
There were two other words on the front of the little device. In raised plastic lettering across its top was embossed a lately created but suddenly quite familiar description of the electronic organelle that lay in the beating heart of this radio, and that essentially, if incomprehensibly, made it work: TRANSISTORIZED.
Then, in a minuscule oblong space above the tuning wheel, a space easily overlooked, there was the second word, which was destined to become one of the best-known brand names in the world. That word was SONY.
The tentacles of what would become a giant global corporation, whose inventions would affect the ways many millions of people took pleasure from their lives, had started extending their way east across the Pacific. The Japanese electronic century, as some would call it, had officially slithered into existence.
It is tempting to suppose that Sony sent its first radios to Canada rather than to the United States for reasons having much to do with the Second World War, then only a decade past. But the truth is more mundane. A Canadian businessman named Albert Cohen, wandering through Japan in search of opportunities, happened to spot an advertisement in a Tokyo newspaper seeking a distributor for a n
ew kind of radio. He arranged an appointment, sought and offered terms that were mutually agreeable, closed a deal on a handshake, and lugged a crate filled with fifty radios back to his company headquarters in Winnipeg. That Sony’s first beachhead beyond Japan was thereby established among the grain elevators and green expanses of the North American prairies, a world away from Asia and the great blue expanses of the Pacific Ocean, speaks volumes: an early hint that the Pacific’s economic and cultural reach was to be unimaginably vast, almost limitless.
The man with whom Albert Cohen had his first dealings in the summer of 1955 was Akio Morita, the better-known and most public face of what would become the Sony Corporation. In 1955, Morita was well on his way to becoming the elegant silver fox of Japanese electronics. He was worldly, sophisticated, patrician (the silkily affluent heir to a Nagoya sake-brewing dynasty), and a visionary. He had a degree in physics, but he was not, strictly speaking, an engineer. And the beginnings of Sony—indeed, the beginnings of everything that would underpin Japan’s remarkable revival after the ruin and humiliations of a roundly lost war—were rooted solidly in the world of engineering and in the grimy hands of its practitioners.
Happily the man who was to be Morita’s cofounder of Sony, the much less well-remembered Masaru Ibuka, was a true engineer, a classic of the breed. By the time the pair first met, in 1944—when Ibuka was already thirty-six, a great crag of a man; bluff, myopic, and shambling; ursine and untidy; and towering over the twenty-three-year-old Morita—Ibuka was already known as a tinkerer, a maker, an inventor. In 1933, when he was still at university, he had been handed an early award (a Gold Prize from the Paris World’s Fair) for devising a way to make the glow in neon lamps appear to flow—so-called dancing neon, created by attaching a high-frequency power supply to one end of a neon tube and varying its output, a technique still much used today in advertising signs.
He was captivated by all things mechanical. He was a ham radio operator, had made his own gramophone, and had built a pair of stupendously large loudspeakers for use in a local sports stadium. He collected music boxes, player pianos, and organs, and to amuse himself, he had a remote-controlled helium balloon. He was also entranced from childhood by model railway trains, and would in time become president of the Japanese Association of Microtrains. More often than not he could be found on his knees on the tatami, reconnecting a length of miniature railroad track or tightening the screws on a steam locomotive.
It was the summer of 1944, and one desperate, last-ditch effort by the Japanese military to reverse the tide of what was now clearly an unwinnable war, that first brought Ibuka and Morita together.
The munitions ministry wanted to devise a new kind of antiaircraft missile, to harry and maybe bring down some of the American B-29s that, with their relentlessly lethal firebombing campaigns, were so devastating Japanese cities. They turned to a Tokyo maker of naval radar, the Japanese Instrument Measurements Company (JIMCO), and ordered the young naval lieutenant Morita, who had a degree in physics, to act as liaison.
Ibuka was the managing director of JIMCO, and from their first meeting, his inventive genius entirely captivated Morita. He was evidently a true lateral thinker, years before the concept was born: to solve a problem concerning the oscillations of a new radio transmitter, for instance, he had hired a score of young women, all of them music students from a nearby college, to employ their perfect pitch to help him adjust the radio to the exact frequency of a tuning fork. Such ingenuity! Morita thought. Such imagination! Ibuka-san, rough around the edges though he might be, and with a Tokyo workingman’s accent, was one memorably creative individual!
Either the heat-seeking missile was never made or else it did no good, for eight months later the war was over. But the professional collegiality that had sprung up between Morita and Ibuka developed swiftly into an inseparable and lifelong friendship. The first stirrings of creative energy soon began to display themselves.
Japan in the immediate aftermath of the war was steeped in a miasma of misery. The population—throughout Japan, though most particularly in the capital, Tokyo—was afflicted by a hitherto unknown condition that had been given a new name, plucked from psychiatrists’ manuals: it was kyodatsu, a phenomenon that mixed exhaustion with despair in equal measure.
Hardly surprising: Barely half the inhabitants had a roof over their heads. One in five had tuberculosis. On all sides in the capital were ruined buildings, broken water mains and sewage drains, shattered schools. There was no public transportation: all the buses were destroyed; the trolley lines and their cars had been obliterated. There were the daily degradations and humiliations of the American occupation; there was a pervasive lack of work and its kin: a want of money and widespread beggary and destitution. There was also, or so it seemed, a collapse in society’s moral fiber, with gang warfare, prostitution, thievery, and black marketeering pasted onto a national sense of remorse, guilt, resentment, and a deeply felt, unfocused, and chance-directed bitterness.
Yet, for all that, as 1946 got shakily under way, something curious happened: the Japanese people began to ready themselves, though they knew it not, to rise up and display a mettle quite unimaginable in its scope, heft, and range. And the Pacific Ocean was the theater in which this display was to be most vigorously mounted.
In those first months after the surrender, the country was gripped by a spasm of self-repair, of make-do and mending, of precipitous institutional about-faces and adaptations. Factories that had weeks before been making war materials switched their production lines to start making items needed not by generals and admirals, but by the bone-tired civilians and by the ragged menfolk returning from the battlefields. So bomb casings became charcoal burners, sitting neatly upright on their tail fins and helping households get through that first bitter winter. Large-caliber brass shell cases were modified as rice containers, while tea caddies were fashioned from their smaller shiny cousins. A searchlight mirror maker turned out flat glass panes to repair thousands of smashed Tokyo windows; and for country dwellers, a fighter plane engine piston maker turned his factory to building water pumps. A piston ring fabricator named Soichiro Honda took small engines used during the war as radio generators and strapped them onto the frames of Tokyo’s bicycles—the resulting Bata-Bata motorcycles, the name being onomatopoeic, later evolved into a brand of bike still famed from 1950s Japan as the Dream. Its popularity and commercial success heralded the birth of today’s automobile giant, the Honda Motor Company.
As with Honda, so with the company that would soon be founded by Ibuka and Morita. It was Ibuka himself who first set matters in train. Within moments of the emperor’s broadcast to his nation, announcing the surrender, Ibuka told his radar-making colleagues that he was returning to Tokyo, immediately. He had divined, with what now seems almost messianic clarity, that the country’s future depended on engineers and on their ardent use of technology. He also believed that only in the country’s capital was such progress possible.
As he packed his bags, he dared others to go with him. Six men did—one of them, Akira Higuchi, remarking later that he made his decision “in two shakes, and left without a second thought. It was as if we were communicating telepathically. I followed him then, and I have never left him.”
Higuchi, who eventually became Sony’s head of personnel, was much like Ibuka: a memorable figure. He was a formidable mountaineer, for example, and in later life kept a globe in his office studded with tiny flags indicating the more than one hundred peaks he had scaled. He was still employed by Sony into his eighties and celebrated his eighty-fifth birthday on the top of a ski slope near Lake Tahoe, in the California Sierra.
So Ibuka and Higuchi and their five colleagues took themselves down to Tokyo and promptly set up shop. They managed to rent for a pittance a cramped third-floor room in a near-derelict department store building, and bought desks and worktables. They first agreed on a name, Tokyo Telecommunications Research Institute, though they then changed it, twice, before finally
agreeing on Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Company—in Japanese, Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo, familiarly to be called Totsuko.
Despite having no business or any real idea of what the company might do, make, or even dream about, Masaru Ibuka next wrote out a formal company prospectus. The handwritten ten-page document—written vertically on horizontally lined paper, with blots and crossings-out, and the uncertain look of a schoolboy essay—is preserved now in a specially made glass display case in the Sony archives in Tokyo. It still offers a model for what a company, anywhere in the world, might aspire to be.
According to an equally lovingly preserved English translation of the prospectus, the purpose of Ibuka’s firm was “to establish an ideal factory that stresses a spirit of freedom and open-mindedness, and where engineers with sincere motivation can exercise their technological skills to the highest level.”
We shall, he pledged, “eliminate any unfair profit-seeking exercises” and “seek expansion not only for the sake of size.” Further, “we shall carefully select employees . . . we shall avoid to have [sic] formal positions for the mere sake of having them, and shall place emphasis on a person’s ability, performance and character, so that each individual can fully exercise his or her abilities and skills.
“We shall distribute the company’s surplus earnings to all employees in an appropriate manner, and we shall assist them in a practical manner to secure a stable life. In return, all employees shall exert their utmost effort into their job.”
Finally, his new company would help his country. Its formally stated national intent was to help “reconstruct Japan, and to elevate the nation’s culture through dynamic cultural and technological activities.”
Pacific Page 9
