Hiroshima Gallery

It was a day like today, clear blue skies, few clouds, good visibility. It was 8:15 a.m., and people were on their way to school, work, and then…

Our visit to Hiroshima was as somber as we thought it would be, but we felt we had to see it to really understand the destruction inflicted on the city and its people. And even after visiting, it’s difficult to imagine what it must have been like.

The A-bomb dome stands on one corner of the Peace Memorial Park. It was crushed and burned by the bomb, but the prominent dome remained in the ruins.

As we walked around the dome and along the river, a Japanese man named Mito Kosei offered to give us a free tour of some areas outside the peace park. He was in his mother’s womb at the time of the bomb, and he now dedicates his life to telling people about the horrors of the bomb and the need for nuclear disarmament.

Kosei first showed us this statue, directly under which you can see the shadow burned in by the bomb. The stone is rough from the blast.

He also brought us to this plaque. The intended location to drop the bomb was over the river near the A-bomb dome. Instead, it detonated directly above this spot — a hospital. The temperatures at the center of the fireball reached more than 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

We walked from there through the peace park and into the museum, the rectangular building behind the cenotaph. This Memorial Monument for Hiroshima, City of Peace, in the foreground protects the names of A-bomb victims in a stone coffin. Characters carved on the coffin mean, “Let all the souls here rest in peace, for we shall not repeat the evil.”

From the museum we walked to the Children’s Peace Monument, inspired by Sadako Sasaki, who was exposed to the radiation at age 2 and developed leukemia when she was in sixth grade.

In Japan, it was thought that folding 1,000 papers cranes would make a wish come true. So Sadako folded 1,300, hoping for a cure. It never came, but this monument was built, and paper cranes from all over the world hang here. The statue on top is of a girl holding a crane. The last time we read Sadako’s story, we were middle schoolers.

It was heartbreaking to see the suffering inflicted on Hiroshima, and frightening to know it could still happen to another city, on an even greater scale. But it was also incredible to see the resilience and beauty of a city that had experienced such a massive tragedy. So today, on the 63rd anniversary of the first dropping of a nuclear weapon, we think the children summed it up best:

Statue with shadow

River from the A-bomb dome