The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park

Sitting in the southwestern quadrant of the city, the Genbaku-Domu (lit. “Atomic Bomb Dome,” known officially in English as the Hiroshima Peace Monument) quietly looks out over the city of Hiroshima; a tangible reminder of that morning in August of 1945 when it was one of only a handful of buildings left standing within a one-mile radius. The Peace Monument has gained a certain currency within the popular imagination as a timelessly iconic representation of mankind’s most terrible weapon, second perhaps only to the image of the mushroom cloud itself.

Originally the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall, the building’s structure survived as a result of being mere meters from the hypocenter where the bomb’s force was almost entirely downward. Despite resistance from some residents of Hiroshima following the war (who criticized the preservation of the dome on the grounds that it was an unwanted reminder of the city’s destruction), the dome was preserved as a testament to the destructive power of nuclear weapons. In 1996, the dome was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site, despite objections from the United States and China.

To me, the dome looked almost exactly as I had always expected it would. The only surprise was seeing that the building had been painstakingly preserved down to the rubble that fell within its boundaries. Reactions to the memorial are varied; while most stood and stared in quiet reverence, a few families clamored to have their photo taken in front of the site, flashing peace signs as if being photographed at Disneyland. While I fail to understand the desire motivating the latter group, I suppose that risking such trivialization is simply one of the compromises involved with transforming something like the Genbaku-Domu into a historical site.
While the dome may serve as the most prominent memorial to victims of the atomic bomb, it also merely marks the northern entranceway to the greater Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park. Situated at the fork between the Honkawa and Motoyasu Rivers, the expansive park features a number of memorials and a large museum set against large swaths of open grass.
Just across the river from the dome is the Children’s Peace Monument. Standing atop the monument, holding a golden crane is Sadako Sasaki, whom many of you may have read about in grade school. For those unfamiliar with the story, she was a young girl who developed leukemia as a result of being exposed to radiation from the bomb. While hospitalized, she decided to fold 1000 origami cranes, inspired by a Japanese folk legend that claims that a person who folds one thousand paper cranes will be granted a wish. Although she died at the age of 12, her story has transformed the paper crane into an internationally recognized symbol of hope.
Here we see just a few of the myriad paper cranes sent to Hiroshima from children all over the world. Many of these are displayed in glass cases adjacent to the Children’s Peace Monument.
Heading towards the eastern edge of the park, we find the National Peace Memorial Hall. The largest memorial inside is the so-called Hall of Remembrance. The hall represents a 360º panorama of the ruined city, with the bomb’s hypocenter at the center of the room. The walls are made up of 140,000 tiles, based on the number of victims believed to have died by the end of 1945. The names of the city’s neighborhoods are given on the wall as well, the ones closer to the floor representing those closer to the bomb's hypocenter.
The Memorial Hall also features a section with information on all known bomb victims. You can search through the database for individual victims or families.
Directly in front of the Peace Museum, you’ll find the Cenotaph for the A-Bomb Victims. A stone chest in the center of the monument holds the registry containing the names of all deceased bomb victims. The cenotaph is inscribed with the following words: “Let all souls here rest in peace, for we shall not repeat this evil”.
Just across the pond from the museum sits the Flame of Peace. It has burned continuously since 1964 and will only be extinguished once all of the nuclear weapons on earth have been dismantled. Every time a nuclear weapon is tested, the mayor of Hiroshima sends a letter of protest to a dignitary in the responsible nation. Many of these countless letters can be seen inside the Peace Museum.
The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum itself is a massive structure; you could literally spend an entire day trying to tour it in earnest. Admission costs only ¥50 (just under $0.50 as of this writing) and the museum is full of fascinating artifacts-from a watch forever frozen at 8:15 am to flyers dropped over Hiroshima by American bombers warning of possible air raids. The discourse of the atomic bomb is, of course, a delicate and complex issue but to the credit of the curators, the museum does an excellent job of providing the visitor with a variety of viewpoints. America’s political motivations for dropping the bomb are acknowledged as well as Japan’s wartime aggression (in the case of the contentious issue of the rape of Nanking, both sides of the argument are presented). Even the rarely broached topic of domestic discrimination against hibakusha (bomb victims) is covered. The museum is quite refreshing in its impartiality and apparent refusal to serve any political agenda through historical revisionism.
This is a uniform that was worn by a mobilized junior high school student at the time of the bombing.
This tricycle and helmet belonged to a young boy who died in the bombing. They were buried with the boy by his father and later unearthed when the child’s remains were moved to a proper cemetery.
The museum also features this display that attempts to recreate what victims might have looked like at the time of the bombing. In all honesty, when compared to archival footage and photographs of victims or first-person written accounts, this display seems comparatively mild.
Well, that’s the Hiroshima Peace Park, in a nutshell. In all honesty, it can be a very exhausting and depressing place to visit (not unlike the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C., if you’ve ever been). Still, I feel that travelers passing through Hiroshima, especially those who have not read about or formally studied the discourse of the atomic bomb, should feel some level of responsibility to visit the site and learn about what history will surely remember as one of mankind’s most horrific creations.