Hiroshima, Japan - A Brief Guide And History

By Author: Stuart Cheese
Total Articles: 41
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In my capacity as the UK Director of Operations for One World Tours Limited, I am in a fortunate position to be able to visit places of beauty around the world in order to pass on, first hand, my experiences to potential clients. In this case the destination was Hiroshima, Japan.

I was hard to believe that over 60 years ago that very little remained of Hiroshima after the bomb was dropped. Hiroshima today is a bustling tourist destination that shows hardly any trace of the atrocities that had once visited this place. The A- bomb Dome and a couple of hollow tree trunks are the only physical clues that something of such magnitude had happened here.

I am not really of an age that, thankfully the war affected me personally and obviously am ignorant to the real facts as they did not affect me. Of course during the course of your life you hear about the past and what it was like but that is all it is really.
It is not until you are standing beside the ruins of the a- Bomb Dome that you begin to imagine what horrors took place there.

I took a tour of the Peace Memorial Park where I experienced the Cenotaph ...
... for the A bomb victims, the Children's Peace Monument, the Memorial mound for victims and the Peace Bell. There are numerous monuments dedicated to victims in the park all with their own poignant significance but the one that stood out the most for me was the Children's Peace Monument dedicated to a young girl called Sadako, who died of leukaemia ten years after the atomic bombing.
She has become a legend in Japan and even today visiting Japanese school children and tourists alike make paper cranes to leave in honour of her memory and this is why you will see brightly coloured paper cranes everywhere.
She made over a thousand paper cranes with any paper she could find some so tiny it is difficult to imagine how she could create something so tiny.
These paper cranes were originally taken from the ancient Japanese tradition of origami or paper folding, but today they are known as a symbol of peace.

Sadako was two years old when she was exposed to the A-bomb. At first no one realised the extent of the damage that had been caused as she had no apparent injuries. However, nine years later she suddenly developed signs of an illness. Sadako believed that folding paper cranes would help her recovery and for the eight months that it took the illness to consume her she kept folding them. She passed on October 25, 1955.

I then visited the Peace Memorial Museum where I observed a documentary about what had happened on that fateful day in Hiroshima, seeing actual footage of the events surrounding the impact of the bomb. Whether it affected you personally or not, you could not help but to be moved by the suffering that it caused.

In the East building you can see the events that lead up to the dropping of the atomic bomb, the reconstruction of the city and the terror of nuclear weapons etc.

In the main part of the Museum, you can see artefacts or damage that was caused by the heat ray, blast, fire and radiation. You can also see how the Japanese went about their rescue activities.

The whole experience was very gruesome but also very humbling and the words and memories of others suddenly became more of a reality. These are things that we do not wish to think about in our daily life let alone on a fabulous trip across the world.
I have to say that my day in Hiroshima did not take away from my experiences of Japan, it enhanced it by giving me a greater understanding of something I had not given much thought to.

There were lots of Japanese school children visiting the Park the day I was there, obviously being taught the futility of war and its consequences. Most of them greeted me in English and some even posed for photographs for me and the whole atmosphere seemed calm and relaxed.
My day in Hiroshima bought a bundle of mixed feelings but it is part of my holiday that I will never forget.