Hiroshima, Japan
広島平和記念公園・原爆ドーム · hee-ROH-shee-mah; Genbaku Dome is GEN-bah-koo DOH-moo
At 8:15 on the morning of 6 August 1945 an atomic bomb exploded 600 metres above this spot. The park was the busiest quarter of the city. The ruin with the iron dome was an exhibition hall almost directly under the blast. It has been kept exactly as it was left.
Photo: Christophe95, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons
You are standing in what was Nakajima, the old centre of Hiroshima: narrow streets of shops, inns, cinemas and temples, where about 6,500 people lived. On the morning of 6 August 1945 it was gone in a few seconds.
By the end of that year about 140,000 people had died, out of some 350,000 in the city. Nobody knows the number exactly. Whole families and their records went together.
Close by, with a page of its own: Itsukushima Shrine.
The park and every monument in it are free and open at all hours. The dome is seen from outside its fence. Only the museum has a ticket.
This was the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall, built in 1915 of brick and concrete with a copper dome. People came here for trade fairs and art shows.
The bomb went off about 160 metres to the south-east, and 600 metres up. The blast came down on the building almost from straight above. The copper melted and the roof and floors fell in. But walls pushed from above do not fall over, and some of them stood. Everyone inside, about thirty people, died at once.
Look at the iron ribs of the dome against the sky. That outline is what the city chose to keep.
Now turn and look down the park. A long straight line runs from the dome, through a flame, through a low concrete arch, to a long building on legs. The architect Tange Kenzo laid the whole park on that line.
"The bomb hit the dome." It exploded in the air, and its centre was above a hospital 160 metres away. A small plaque marks that spot in a side street.
"Hiroshima is still radioactive." It is not. The bomb burst high in the air, and what radiation it left on the ground faded within weeks. The level here today is the same as in any city.
"Nothing was to grow here for 75 years." That was said in 1945. Grass and red oleander flowers came up in the ashes the next summer. The oleander is now the city's flower.
"The park was open ground." It was the most crowded part of town. The museum has a model of every house.
"Only Japanese died here." Tens of thousands of Koreans were living and working in Hiroshima, many brought by force, and thousands of them died. So did students from China and South-East Asia, and twelve American prisoners of war.
Chinese and Korean visitors often ask whether this place tells the whole story. Hiroshima was an army city. The troops who invaded China in 1894 and again from 1931 sailed from its port. The museum's east wing says so.
The walk runs from north to south, from the dome to the museum. Everything outside is free.
Walk round it. On the river side, look for window frames bent outward and for a mass of brick lying where it fell. Nothing has been tidied.
For twenty years the city argued over it. Many survivors could not bear to see it and wanted it pulled down. In 1960 a schoolgirl named Kajiyama Hiroko died of leukaemia at sixteen. She had written in her diary that only this hall would go on telling the world about the bomb after the people were gone. Children began to collect money in the streets. In 1966 the city council voted to keep it for ever.
It has been strengthened five times since, each time so that nothing looks changed. Steel frames inside hold the walls.
Just north of the dome is a bridge shaped like the letter T, joining three banks at once. From the air it was easy to find. The bomber's crew used it as the aiming point.
The bomb missed by about 300 metres. Walk east from the dome for two minutes, into a narrow street, to a stone plaque outside a clinic. The explosion was above this point. The ground temperature here reached several thousand degrees.
Cross the river into the park. On your right stands a concrete tower with a girl on top, holding up the outline of a crane.
In Japan it is said that a person who folds a thousand paper cranes is granted a wish. When Sadako died in 1955, her classmates decided to build a monument to all the children the bomb killed. Pupils in more than three thousand schools sent money. It was unveiled in 1958.
The glass cases behind it are full of cranes, strung in thousands. About ten million arrive each year from schools all over the world. You can bring your own and hang them.
The flame burns on a base shaped like two hands opened upward. It was lit on 1 August 1964. It will be put out on the day the last nuclear weapon on earth is destroyed.
The arch is shaped like the clay houses placed in ancient Japanese tombs. It is a roof for the souls of the dead. Under it is a stone chest. In the chest are books with the name of every person known to have died from the bomb, whenever they died. Names are added each 6 August. There are now more than 340,000.
The words on the chest say: "Rest in peace, for the mistake shall not be repeated." The Japanese sentence has no subject. It does not say whose mistake.
Stand in front of the arch and look through it. The flame and the dome are in one line. This is the picture Tange designed, and the one every visitor takes.
In the north-west of the park is a round grassy mound. Under it is a vault with the ashes of about 70,000 people who were never identified, or whose whole family died with them.
Near it hangs a bell under a small dome. Anyone may ring it. The spot where the log strikes is marked with the sign for atomic energy.
Close by, a stone pillar stands on the back of a turtle. It is the monument to the Korean dead. It was put up in 1970 outside the park, on the far side of the river, because no place could be had inside. It was moved in only in 1999.
The cream-coloured building by the bridge was a kimono shop in 1929 and a fuel office in 1945. It stood 170 metres from the centre of the blast. Thirty-seven people were at work in it. One, Nomura Eizo, had gone down to the cellar for some papers. He was the only one who lived. The cellar is kept as it was and can be visited.
The long building is raised on concrete legs so that the park passes under it and the line to the dome stays open.
Inside, the main hall shows things that belonged to people. A child's tricycle. A lunch box whose rice turned to carbon. A wristwatch stopped at 8:15. A flight of stone steps from a bank, with the shadow of the person who was sitting on them.
Many of the dead in these cases were boys and girls of twelve and thirteen. More than six thousand schoolchildren were out in the streets that morning pulling down houses to make fire breaks.
It is hard to look at. Allow two hours, and give yourself a place to sit afterwards.
Beside the museum, steps lead down into a round room below ground. Its wall shows the city as seen from the centre of the blast, made of 140,000 tiles, one for each of the dead of 1945. In the next room you can search for a name and see a face. It is free and almost empty.
The French film Hiroshima mon amour (1959), directed by Alain Resnais from a script by Marguerite Duras, was shot here in 1958. A French actress and a Japanese architect walk through the museum, the park and along this river. He tells her again and again: "You saw nothing in Hiroshima." To take its view of the dome, stand on the east bank of the river, just south of the dome, and look north along the water.
The animated film In This Corner of the World (2016) opens in the lost streets of Nakajima in 1933, with the girl Suzu carrying seaweed past this hall. The makers rebuilt every shop front from old photographs and from what survivors remembered. The rest house, then a kimono shop, is in the first scenes.
In Drive My Car (2021), which won the Oscar for best international film, the young driver takes her passenger to a rubbish incineration plant by the sea. She explains that the building has a gap through its middle, so as not to block the line that runs from the dome through the arch to the water.
Barefoot Gen, a comic by Nakazawa Keiji, who was six and a kilometre away when the bomb fell, has been read by Japanese schoolchildren since 1973 and is translated into more than twenty languages.
In English the first full account was John Hersey's Hiroshima, which filled a whole issue of The New Yorker in August 1946. The Polish composer Penderecki's Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima (1960), for fifty-two string instruments, is played in concert halls all over the world.
| Year | Here | Elsewhere |
|---|---|---|
| 1894 | Japan's war headquarters, with the emperor, moves to Hiroshima | Japan and China are at war over Korea |
| 1915 | The exhibition hall opens | The second year of the First World War |
| 6 August 1945 | The bomb | Nagasaki is bombed on the 9th; Japan surrenders on the 15th |
| 1949 | Japan's parliament makes Hiroshima a "city of peace" by law | The Soviet Union tests its first atomic bomb |
| 1955 | The museum opens | Einstein and Bertrand Russell warn the world against nuclear war |
| 1964 | The flame is lit | A runner born near Hiroshima on the day of the bomb lights the flame of the Tokyo Olympics |
| 1966 | The city votes to keep the dome | France begins nuclear tests in the Pacific |
| 1996 | The dome joins the World Heritage list | The treaty banning all nuclear tests is opened for signing |
| 2016 | President Obama visits | Britain votes to leave the European Union |
| 2024 | The survivors' organisation Nihon Hidankyo is given the Nobel Peace Prize | The war in Ukraine is in its third year |
One line to remember: the dome is what was left. The park is what people decided to do about it.
These are stories people tell about this place. They are legends, not history, and each one says where it comes from.
Sadako believed that if she folded a thousand cranes she would get well. She died with 644 folded, and her classmates folded the rest to bury with her.
Source: Eleanor Coerr, Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes (1977); her family and the museum say she folded well over a thousand
Scientists said nothing would grow in Hiroshima for seventy-five years.
Source: A rumour of August 1945, traced to an American newspaper interview; it was false
Later, people who live here will be able to add the stories they grew up with, and say which of these they have heard.
Last checked 2026-11-12. Notices of the City of Hiroshima on the museum's hours and web tickets, 2024–2026.
Checked 2026-11-12
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