It’s hard to know what to expect from the Hiroshima Peace Park. You’ll find the Peace Park the at the center of Hiroshima, in a part of town completely decimated by the atomic bomb that the United States dropped there in 1945. While we returned the next day to see the Hiroshima Museum, I took a morning to take in the Peace Park, while it was still quiet and largely empty.
Early morning walk through Hiroshima
I loved walking through Hiroshima early in the morning. On my way to the peace park, I stopped to enjoy a lovely Larson’s and take in the views of the trains. In some ways, because Hiroshima was rebuilt in the 1950’s, it’s well adapted to modern culture. It’s not a beautiful old city, but it feels like it works well. Main streets are wide, with train tracks down the center and pedestrian bridges overhead.
Trains are a particular obsession in Hiroshima. The town collects train cars and engines from all over the world, from all different historical eras, and puts them to work. So, you’ll see both antique and super modern trains in one short walk. It’s fun to see how they all seem to work together seamlessly.
Hiroshima Peace Park
There are over 60 statues and memorials in the Peace Park. You probably won’t see all of them in a single visit, but its lovely to walk around and see all of the different ways in which victims and heroes of Hiroshima have been honored.
You can just walk and see what you see (there is information in English for most of the sites) or you can use a map. There are simple maps that contain just the highlights (Google and Apple Maps will also give you the most popular sites) and more complex ones that contain every stop you can make! Because there are so many memorials, it’s useful to read up on at least some of them before you set you so you know what you’re looking at (this site is also great).
Sites Outside the Hiroshima Peace Park: The A-Dome, Hypocenter, and Survivor Jizo
Two important stops, outside the park, include the hypocenter — which marks the spot where the a-bomb, still airborne, detonated — and a jizo which, although quite near the hypocenter, survived the blast.
Honestly, we struggled to find both!
The Hypocenter is represented by a small plaque on a backstreet (link is to the precise location on a map). It’s very easy to walk by. But it is awesome to find it, to feel how much city there is (and how normal it seems) right below the center of this devastating explosion.
We wandered around and around a temple and a cemetery (seriously testing the patience of my traveling companions!). It wasn’t until we finally gave up and wandered down the street that we found the surviving jizo! (He’s here.)
Feel the jizo when you find it. His head is rough; you can feel that the finish has been blasted right off of him. The protected areas under his body are still shiny and smooth. A visit to Hiroshima shows a scale of destruction that is nearly unimaginable. But it’s these small, tangible things that make it seem so real and so close. As you wander through the museum, you’ll have this feeling many more times.
The A-Bomb Dome: A Relic to the Destruction
The most iconic building in Hiroshima is the Genbaku Dome, also called the Atomic Bomb Dome or the A-Bomb Dome. This building is one of the few buildings left standing after the blast, and the Japanese have left the ruins up — and focused memorials on it — as a means of symbolizing and remembering the destruction.
Looking into the building and seeing the twisted metal staircases (these are what struck me the most strongly) reveals viscerally just how powerful the bomb was.
Exploring the Peace Park
From the A-Dome and many other spots in the city, there are bridges into the park. There is also a path along the outskirts of the park where you’ll find a multitude of statues and memorials. Although the A-Dome is outside the park, it is, in many ways the symbolic center of the area, as you’ll see when you look through the Cenotaph
Paper Cranes as a Symbol of Healing and Hope
The story of Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes is required reading before a visit to Hiroshima (for adults and kids alike). Not only does the story make real and human the story of the bomb and its aftermath, but it explains the significance of paper cranes in Hiroshima.
The quick version is that Sadako, a young girl who survived the blast, developed leukemia and was given a short time to live. She believed the folk tale that said that if she folded 1,000 paper cranes, she would be granted a wish (to live). When she died before she completed her folding project, her classmates rallied and folded the remaining hundreds of cranes. The story took off and people around the world folded cranes for Sadako.
Paper cranes in the Hiroshima Peace Park today
To this day, people around the world fold and mail chains of origami cranes to Hiroshima. I brought cranes of my own to leave at the Sadako memorial. What I did not expect was for there to be chains and chains of hundreds of cranes at every memorial that mentioned children. It’s striking and beautiful.
The first set of cranes I saw were at a memorial outside the park (near the dock for the boat to Miyajima) that I never identified. But, given the trend, I assume it has something to do with children.
The main paper crane memorial is the Children’s Peace Monument. The memorial itself depicts a triumphant young girl, high in the sky, and is surrounded by display cabinets of cranes from all over the world. I saw the memorial very early in the morning and there was no one to receive my cranes, but I was surprised to see it is a formal operation (rather than a “drop your origami around the base of the statue” sort of affair).
I ended up leaving my little crane collection at another memorial on the other side of the museum.
The Cenotaph of Hiroshima’s Peace Park
The official name of the Cenotaph is the Memorial Monument for Hiroshima, City of Peace. If, like me, you have not encountered the word cenotaph before, it’s an empty tomb, built to honor people whose remains are lost or somewhere else.
This cenotaph honors the victims of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima: it contains registries (still growing) of all of the names of the known victims of the bomb. The Cenotaph is engraved with “Let all the souls here rest in peace, for we shall not repeat the evil.” If a visit to the Hiroshima Peace Park leaves you with a single notion, this should be it.
If you peer through the Cenotaph, you look out over the Pond of Peace, which contains the Flame of Peace (a flame that will not be extinguished until all atomic weapons have been eliminated), and see a perfectly framed A-Bomb Dome in the distance. The semi-circle under the cenotaph, which protects the names of all of the a-bomb victims, perfectly contains both the destruction of the past and the hope for the future. It’s quite beautiful.
When I was there, quite early in the morning (hours before the museum opened), most visitors seemed to be local. They came, stood before the cenotaph, seemed to say a quick prayer, and then continued on. It looked to me like a daily stop for many Hiroshima residents who lost friends and family members.
Just Wander The Park
Overall, the Peace Park is beautiful, sad, and a testament to the resilience of the Hiroshima people.
There are memorials and exhibits everywhere. Just wander around and take a look. And the park is lovely, surrounded by water and a lovely place to walk and recover after you visit the museum (and you will need a moment to recover after the museum).
The Peace Museum
Of course, the true center of the Peace Park is the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. This is an museum that you never want to go to and one that you leave feeling that every single person in the world should go.
There’s a memorial on the path outside the park which gives the opening mood to the museum. It’s called A-Bomb Victim — A Monument to Hiroshima. It depicts a black, sort of formless (scorched and ruined?) form, flying. Below it there are two photographs on the pedestal: Hiroshima before the bomb and after. This simple but horrifically effective monument captures the tone of the entire park and museum: artful, spare depiction of an unimaginable devastation.
The museum itself is an unassuming building. It stands at the foot of the park, looking over a green space used for events, and looks like it could be a government or administration building.
Before We Enter, the Details
The hours of the museum start quite early (often 7:30am or earlier). However, the ticket office doesn’t open until a bit later, so buy tickets online if you want to enter early. When we went, during the summer, but also during the week, we did not need any kind of reservations and it was not crowded. There were other people there, but we never felt crowded or rushed.
How hard is it on children?
We visited with a 13-year-old. The museum is a lot. It does not over-exaggerate or try to pull heart strings, but the photos are graphic. Some of them would be hard for anyone to look at, and might be too much for younger or sensitive children.
Some of the other displays, while incredibly poignant, might have less impact on young kids (while a lunchbox with scorched contents broke my heart, it might not be as impactful to someone without kids).
That said, it seems like something everyone should experience. For kids, especially at that age when war and fighting seem so cool, this experience feels critical: war is awful and deadly and painful.
How hard is it on Americans?
There are always moments when traveling when I’m very struck by being American. Visiting a park in Belgrade and seeing the monument to children killed by missile strikes ordered by Bill Clinton was one of those moments. Visiting the Hiroshima Peace Museum took that feeling to a whole different level: America was responsible for this incredible level of destruction and pain.
There are parts of the museum (later on, after the exhibits about what happened and the effects) about the war and decisions that were made. Of course, these are not the conversations that we have in American history class (where Truman had to balance the number of American lives that would be lost in continued battles against a foe who refused to give up and the loss of Japanese civilian lives), but I never felt like it was America bashing. The accounts seemed straight-forward and true from a Japanese point of view.
I felt shame. But I don’t think any of it was unwarranted. It’s tough to go through this museum as an American. You can’t shake the feeling of “we did this,” but I also could not help but feel like it’s something that every American should feel for a moment. We can do this. We did do this. But let’s think long and hard before we do anything like it again.
The “Memories of Friends” Exhibit (2024)
We did not buy museum tickets online, so we arrived just before the box office opened. We were not allowed to enter (and did not feel like trying to operate the online system right then and there to save 15 minutes), but we were allowed to walk through the special exhibit that was on the first floor.
The exhibit told the story of a group of middle school students in Hiroshima who had just started keeping diaries in school. The first part of the exhibit shows their diary entries. They are normal kids, worried about friendships and the future, but also struggling with war: doing work details in the streets and feeling hungry and scared.
Then the exhibit gave survivors’ accounts of August 6, 1945, when the bomb dropped.
The rest of the exhibit was stories, interviews, photos, and surviving belongings and pieces of clothing from the kids: some died right away, some went missing, some survived a few days and then succumbed to radiation sickness, still others to cancer years later. Their poems, drawings, memories of their friends, and surviving items knocked me to my core.
As the parent of a middle school student, by the time we finished the special exhibit, I could barely hold it together. I wasn’t sure I’d survive the main hall.
The Permanent Exhibit
The first few rooms: the scale of destruction
The permanent exhibit opens with a huge photographic mural of Hiroshima before the bomb. You see a normal Japanese city: people shopping, biking in the streets, delivery guys, people with kids and babies. Then there’s a clock projected on the wall with the time and date of the bomb.
The next room shows an identical mural but of Hiroshima post-bomb: it’s flattened. Almost everything is gone.
In the second room, there is a huge circle with an aerial view of the city in it. As you watch, the bomb drops, a flash at the hypocenter that explodes to encompass a one mile radius. The devastation is instantaneous and almost complete.
The Next Rooms: Making the Destruction Personal
I mostly stopped taking pictures after these first two rooms. Everything else just became so personal: photographs of people covered in burns with their skin peeling off, belongings of people who did not survive, diaries and testimonies of those who did survive (although many who wrote their stories did not survive long).
The relics that really got me included a metal lunchbox with its contents fully carbonized. There were also ink jars left over from a print shop, totally melted together from the heat.
Truly it was stunning to imagine that anyone survived a blast that strong and that hot. One photo I did snap was of the sidewalk steps that still retained the shadow of a man who was sitting there when the bomb landed.
Although a lot of the museum focuses on the blast (and the photos are brutal), it then moves on to talk about the aftermath, from radiation sickness, to cancer, to living when everyone else is lost.
The Last Rooms: The History, Science, and Future of Atomic Weapons
Then, there are several displays that talk about the atomic bomb, how it was developed, how it works, and how it evolved into our current nuclear weapons. There are also some hands-on displays that show the force of an atomic explosive. One of the most telling one involved glass soda bottles, showing how bottles were affected. There’s something about these regular, daily items that makes you really understand the power of the bomb (and the power to deform, but not necessarily destroy, which was sometimes even worse).
The museum then ends with a true cry for peace. And it’s really hard to leave this museum without thinking that that’s the only conclusion we can come to: we must never deploy atomic weapons again.
Overall, the museum is utterly heart-breaking and completely necessary. I recommend that everyone go. I’ve never experienced anything like it. But give yourself some time to recoup before you move on to more joyful things: it’s a gut punch.