This page summarises my personal observations in Hiroshima and my opinions after considerable background reading from many diverse sources. Like many other web pages that deal with the atomic bombings of Japan, I have chosen a black background to reflect the sombre nature of this page.

I must admit that I was surprised when I found out (a number of years ago) that people actually still lived in Hiroshima. I always thought that the deadly radioactivity left behind by an atomic bomb would have rendered the place uninhabitable for millennia (a recurring fate for the Earth in many science fiction stories - which is probably where I got the idea). Well, Hiroshima was rebuilt about 5 years after it was completely flattened by the bomb and, not surprisingly, it has become a spiritual centre of the peace movement for the banning of atomic weapons.

Most Japanese people pay a visit to Hiroshima and/or Nagasaki at sometime in their life (usually on a school trip) but I was surprised to find that many UK tours also went there. It certainly isn't my idea of a holiday but nonetheless I felt compelled to add Hiroshima to our tour. Thanks to Japan's high speed bullet trains, it's possible to visit Hiroshima on a day-trip from Kyoto (or even Tokyo at a push) but we decided to spend two nights there after we read that one of the most photographed tourist attractions in Japan (Miya-jima Island) was located close by.

It was raining when we arrived in Hiroshima, which set the mood for what was to be quite an emotional visit. Our hotel was located just 500m from the epicentre of the explosion which certainly wasn't a good place to be at 8:15am on August 6th, 1945 and, to be honest, I was still surprised that it was safe from radiation even today.

The Peace Memorial Park covers the northern end of a long island very close to the epicentre of the explosion. It is believed that the T-shaped bridge at the tip of this island was the target for the bomb.

The park contains a cenotaph where the names of approximately 200,000 people who died as a result of the atomic bomb are kept. This list is updated each year, on the anniversary of the bomb, with the names of anybody who has since died as a result of the bomb - although it must be getting hard now to attribute somebody's death to the bomb after they have survived it for over 54 years.

There is a peace flame burning below the cenotaph which will be extinguished when all of the nuclear weapons in the world have been destroyed. The park also contains the Peace Museum as well as countless memorials erected by various groups.

The Children's Memorial
This is undoubtedly the most moving of the many memorials in the Peace Park. It was inspired by Sadako Sasaki who died of leukaemia in 1955. She was 2 years old when the atomic bomb exploded just over a mile away from her home in Hiroshima. She wasn't obviously injured by the bomb but her exposure to the radiation caught up with her 10 years later when she was diagnosed with leukaemia. While she was being treated in hospital she started to fold paper cranes - the Japanese symbol of long life - from medicine wrappers believing that if she completed 1,000 of them she would get better. Accounts vary but most say that she had completed 644 of them when she died at the age of 12.

Her classmates completed the remaining 356 cranes which started off a nationwide crusade of paper crane folding that has continued ever since and has even spread to other countries. Hundreds of paper cranes strung into colourful chains or made into pictures are regularly delivered and there are literally millions of them draped around the Children's Memorial. The paper crane has since been adopted as an international symbol of the movement for nuclear disarmament (and I have also adopted it as the background for this page). Follow this link to find out how to fold a paper crane.

Sadako was just one of many thousands of children who died in Hiroshima and yet one child's story seems to generate such emotion in people - I could barely see the words on my screen as I typed this.

The Peace Memorial Museum
We were both more than a little worried about the horrors that we might see inside this museum but, just as we had come to Hiroshima, we had to go inside the museum. However, it wasn't nearly as horrific as it could have been although there certainly were some disturbing images.

The museum was mostly filled with relics and photographs of the city after the bomb. It also presented some theories about why Hiroshima was chosen for the first atomic bomb. It seems that, even though Hiroshima was a strategic target, it was one of the very few cities in Japan (which included Nagasaki) that hadn't been bombed at all by the Allied forces. They suggest that Hiroshima had deliberately been left alone so that the Americans could accurately gauge the destructive effect of the atomic bomb.

Throughout the museum, the people of Hiroshima are presented as the victims of “the bomb” and not of “the war”. I specifically looked but I didn't see any mention of the role that Japan played in the war and they certainly didn't seem to be taking any share of the blame for the dropping of the bomb. As horrific as the atomic bomb was, you only need to read about the Battle of Okinawa to be convinced that the casualties (which would have included mass civilian suicides) would have been very much higher had the bomb not been used.

Hiroshima-jo Castle

Now, thanks to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the whole world is painfully aware of the devastating effects that even such small atomic bombs can have. However, at the time, the survivors of Hiroshima had absolutely no idea what had hit them. They didn't know then that the city would be dangerously radioactive for many days after the bomb and that the water for miles around had also been contaminated from the fallout. One of the very few buildings to remain standing after the blast was the Bank of Japan building and, even though it was completely gutted from the fireball which had also killed all of the employees, it reopened for limited business 2 days later. This completely baffles me! With 75,000 people already dead and almost the same number again to die shortly afterwards, they actually used one of the few remaining buildings as a bank! Why? Who needed money? Who would have been willing to work in this bank when so many people were dying or in desperate need of medical attention?

Around Hiroshima, there are signs by anything that survived the atomic bomb which always give their distance from the epicentre. We were very surprised to come across a eucalyptus tree that had somehow survived the bomb despite being only 740m from the epicentre - however it didn't look particularly healthy!