Hiroshima: The A-Bomb Dome
The A-Bomb Dome stands today almost exactly as it was left on the morning of 6 August 1945, and that is the whole point of it. At 8:15am, a US B-29 dropped the uranium bomb “Little Boy,” which detonated roughly 600 metres above the city, the first use of a nuclear weapon in war. The building beneath it, the former Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall, designed by the Czech architect Jan Letzel and completed in 1915, stood almost directly under the blast. Its dome and skeletal walls held their shape while the buildings around it were flattened, and everyone inside was killed. Estimates of the bombing’s total toll vary by source, but around 140,000 people were dead by the end of 1945, out of a wartime population of roughly 350,000; about 90% were civilians. Survivors are known as hibakusha.
Hiroshima City Council formally voted to preserve the ruin rather than demolish it in 1966, and restoration work continued through 1990 to stabilize it without disguising what it is. UNESCO inscribed it as a World Heritage Site in 1996, recognizing it both as physical evidence of nuclear destruction and, in the words used around the site itself, a prayer for peace.
Peace Memorial Park
The Dome anchors the north end of Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, laid out on the delta where the hypocenter district once stood. The Memorial Cenotaph, a saddle-shaped concrete arch, frames a sightline through the Flame of Peace toward the Dome beyond; it shelters a stone chest holding the names of the dead, and its epitaph reads, in translation, “Rest in peace, for the error shall not be repeated,” worded without a stated subject so that the pledge belongs to everyone who reads it. The Flame of Peace has burned continuously since 1964, intended to be extinguished only once every nuclear weapon on Earth is destroyed.
The Children’s Peace Monument stands nearby, inspired by Sadako Sasaki, who was two years old and roughly 1.6 kilometres from the hypocenter when the bomb fell. Leukemia symptoms appeared nine years later; she began folding paper cranes that August, believing a legend that a thousand cranes granted a wish, and continued past that number before her death in October 1955, aged 12. Visitors from around the world still fold and leave cranes at her monument today. The Peace Memorial Museum, its main building reopened in 2019 after seismic reinforcement, holds the personal belongings, photographs, and testimony that make the bombing’s human cost impossible to look away from; visiting takes real time and it should be given it.
Every 6 August, a ceremony marks the moment of the bombing at 8:15am with a shared silence, followed that evening by lanterns carrying peace messages set adrift on the Motoyasu River. This is a day of remembrance for the city, not an event to plan a trip around for its atmosphere.
Visiting
The Dome and the park are a short tram ride or walk from Hiroshima Station, and entry to the park itself is free. Move slowly, keep your voice down, and let photography follow the same register you’d use at any memorial to mass death, documentary rather than a backdrop. For the wider city around it, our full Hiroshima guide and our piece on the city itself cover where the living, rebuilt Hiroshima picks up from here.