Before August 6, 1945
Hiroshima was a moderately large Japanese city with a particular strategic character: it was the headquarters of the Second Army and a major military embarkation port, and it had been spared the conventional bombing campaigns that had destroyed large parts of Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya. That relative preservation made it, paradoxically, a cleaner target — American planners wanted an undamaged city so the damage from the new weapon would be legible and unambiguous. The decision to exclude Hiroshima from earlier raids was not goodwill; it was planning.
The city had a population of around 350,000 on the morning of August 6. By the end of the day, somewhere between 70,000 and 80,000 were dead; by the end of 1945, that figure had risen to between 90,000 and 166,000, the range reflecting the difficulty of counting people killed by radiation in the weeks and months after the blast. The fireball reached 6,000 degrees Celsius at the hypocenter. The blast radius of near-total destruction extended roughly 1.6 kilometres in every direction.
The Dome That Was Not Supposed to Survive
The building now known as the Atomic Bomb Dome was a Czech-designed exhibition hall completed in 1915 — the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall, a Secessionist structure of considerable elegance with a copper dome. It was considered one of the most attractive buildings in western Japan. The bomb detonated 600 metres above and 150 metres to the southeast of it.
Almost everything within a 2-kilometre radius was flattened. The dome survived structurally — the walls and iron framework held — because the force came from directly above rather than laterally. A blast from the side would have pushed the walls outward and collapsed the building immediately. Instead the downward pressure compressed the structure vertically, leaving the exterior shell largely intact while destroying everything inside it and killing everyone within.
The question of what to do with the ruin generated significant controversy in the postwar decades. Reconstruction advocates argued for demolition: the ruins were a constant grief. Preservation advocates — including many atomic bomb survivors, or hibakusha — argued that the ruin was the only authentic witness to what had happened, and that demolishing it would be a form of erasure. Hiroshima City voted to preserve it permanently in 1966. It became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1996.
Rebuilding the City
Hiroshima passed the Hiroshima Peace Memorial City Construction Law in 1949, allocating national funds to rebuild the city from an urban-planning perspective rather than simply reconstructing what had stood before. The centerpiece of that plan was Heiwa Odori — Peace Boulevard — a 100-metre-wide road running 4 kilometres through the city center. The width had nothing to do with traffic flow; it was designed explicitly as a firebreak, so that a future catastrophe of any kind could not propagate across it. The road you cross to reach the Peace Memorial Park from the hotel is functional disaster prevention built into the street layout.
The rest of the rebuilding was rapid and not always beautiful. Much of central Hiroshima today is standard postwar Japanese concrete construction — department stores, office towers, covered shopping arcades. The city's character is less about what survived (almost nothing did) than about the decision, embedded in street widths and memorial parks, to make the absence of the old city permanently visible.
Miyajima and the Seto Inland Sea
Miyajima — formally Itsukushima — is an island four kilometres off the Hiroshima coast that has been considered sacred since at least the sixth century. The shrine was built partly over the sea so that the ordinary and the sacred would not share the same ground. For much of its history, the island was so venerated that neither birth nor death was permitted there: pregnant women were sent to the mainland before labour, and the dying were moved off-island before their final hours. The rule around death extended to burials: there are no graves on Miyajima.
The Otorii Gate — the large vermilion torii standing in the sea at the shrine's seaward entrance — has been rebuilt eight times over the centuries. The current gate dates from 1875. It stands on the tidal flat rather than on posts driven into the seafloor; its weight alone holds it in place. At low tide you can walk to its base. At high tide it appears to float. Both are genuinely different experiences and both are worth seeing if the schedule permits staying until tide change.
The Peace Memorial Museum
The museum opened in 1955, ten years after the bombing. It is divided into two buildings connected by a corridor: the East Building covers the general context of Hiroshima before and after the bombing, while the West Building deals with the bombing itself in close detail — the photographs, the artifacts recovered from the hypocenter area, the personal effects of specific individuals who died that morning. The West Building is the section most visitors find hardest.
The museum charges ¥200 admission — a price that has been kept low by explicit policy since the beginning. The original reasoning has been restated by successive museum directors: the facts documented here belong to everyone, and the cost of seeing them should not be an obstacle. This pricing philosophy is unusual enough among major international museums that it is worth noting: the Peace Memorial Museum, by any measure of historical gravity, charges less than a vending machine coffee.
Pre-booking is strongly recommended during peak periods (spring and summer). Walk-up queues have exceeded an hour during busy weeks.
Okonomiyaki and the Postwar Kitchen
Hiroshima-style okonomiyaki — the layered savory pancake the city is known for — developed in the postwar years as a way to stretch limited ingredients. Where Osaka okonomiyaki mixes everything into the batter, Hiroshima-style builds in separate layers: first the crepe, then cabbage, then pork, then soba or udon noodles, then egg. The layering technique made a small amount of protein go further. What began as rationing adaptation became the city's culinary identity within a generation.
Okonomimura — the three-story building in Shintenchi housing over twenty individual okonomiyaki stalls — has been operating since 1945. Each stall is run independently, each with a different recipe. The building is the most concentrated destination for the dish in the city, and walking through it floor by floor gives a clear picture of how widely the "same" dish can vary between makers.