Very soon after the official Peace Day ceremony, we joined Tommy on a walking tour of the city center, learning about the history and geography of Hiroshima and stopping at various landmarks from that fateful day 80 years ago.
One thing I didn’t know before Tommy’s tour was that Hiroshima was literally carved out from the sea. The Hiroshima Delta, where the Ota River fans into multiple channels before entering the Seto Inland Sea, was originally a marshy estuary. For centuries, much of what is now central Hiroshima, including the area near the Peace Memorial Park, didn’t exist as solid land at all. The area’s transformation began in 1589, when Mōri Terumoto built Hiroshima Castle. He chose the delta for its strategic position, controlling river and sea routes. To support the castle town, his engineers began diverting channels, constructing levees, and filling tidal flats with sand and soil.
After the atomic bombing in 1945, Hiroshima had to rebuild almost from scratch. The area where the Peace Memorial Park now stands was the central commercial and administrative district, which was almost entirely erased in an instant.
The structure you see in these photos, now often referred to as the A-Bomb Dome (原爆ドーム, Genbaku Dōmu), but officially called the Hiroshima Peace Memorial, is one haunting symbol of what was not. It stood just 160 meters from the hypocenter.
It’s an enduring metaphor for the spirit of this place. But having learned more about Hiroshima’s topography, I feel like it’s only one small part of a larger theme. The whole city came to be out of sheer willpower. That it would transform again in the last 80 years should come as no surprise.
I was very heartened to see so many marches for Gaza on August 6, bookending the day from the Peace Day ceremony to the end of our walking tour. As a comrade put it, grief alone is not enough, nor is any talk of peace without justice—and Hiroshima showed up on this historic day in a big way. It was very inspiring to witness this energy and passion.
Some of the sites we stopped at included: the hypocenter, or the exact point on the ground directly beneath the atomic bomb’s detonation in the air; a Shinto shrine still bearing the scars of the blast; the former Bank of Japan, which resumed limited operations only two days after the blast ,and is now a small museum and memorial space; and the Children’s Peace Monument (原爆の子の像, Genbaku no Ko no Zō), depicting Sadako Sasaki, famous for popularizing folding cranes as a symbol of world peace.
When I told Tommy about how our smaller tribute to Sadako in Seattle was stolen, literally sawed off at the ankles, he was baffled. “Wow. That is very strange.” Yes. Very strange.
One of the last places visited on Tommy’s tour was the @hiroshima_orizuru_tower, named after the paper crane (折り鶴, literally ‘folded crane’), where a few of us met an Australian man in the lobby who was handing out 1000 cranes he’d folded to 1000 strangers he’ll meet. He’d apparently folded twice that many, as he planned to do the same in Nagasaki. Mine is sitting on my desk right now.
These are the views from the top of the tower. Nearby, I fumbled through folding my very first crane (much more difficult than it looks!), then dropped it down the glass facade of the front of the building. I’ll post a video of that next.