Few city names carry as much meaning as Hiroshima. On 6 August 1945, at 8:15 in the morning, the first atomic bomb ever used against a population destroyed the city in an instant and changed the history of humanity forever. Visiting Hiroshima is, above all, an act of remembrance: walking through the Peace Memorial Park, seeing the skeletal Atomic Bomb Dome still standing by the river and stepping into the Memorial Museum is a sober, deeply shaking experience that stays with you and that, far from resentment, carries a universal message for peace and against nuclear weapons.
But it would be unfair to reduce Hiroshima to its tragedy. The city you find today is bright, modern and full of life, rebuilt entirely from the ashes: wide tree-lined avenues, trams running from one end to the other, a restored castle and garden, and a food scene with real character, starting with Hiroshima-style okonomiyaki and oysters from the Inland Sea. It is a city that chose to look forward and make peace its banner, and that vitality lives alongside memory without contradiction.
This guide covers the essentials of Hiroshima with the seriousness the place deserves and with a practical eye: how to visit the Peace Park and Museum, what its monuments mean, what else to see in the city, where to eat well and how to get around. And how to combine it with the nearby island of Miyajima, one of the most famous landscapes in Japan. Hiroshima is no ordinary destination: it is a place that challenges you, moves you and, at the same time, teaches you to look to the future with hope.
Hiroshima was founded as a castle town in 1589, when the lord Mori Terumoto built his castle on the Ota River delta and named it 'Hiroshima' ('wide island'). For centuries it was a prosperous port city and, from the Meiji era onwards, an important military centre. That military role made it a target: on 6 August 1945, in the final weeks of the Second World War, the United States dropped the atomic bomb 'Little Boy' on it, which exploded at a height of about 600 metres and flattened the city. Tens of thousands of people died instantly, and by the end of that year the death toll is estimated at around 140.000, including those injured and those sickened by radiation. After the war, instead of abandoning it, Japan rebuilt Hiroshima, and in 1949 a law officially declared it a 'Peace Memorial City'. The Peace Memorial Park was created over ground zero, and the Atomic Bomb Dome —the building left standing beneath the hypocentre— was preserved as a testimony and declared a World Heritage Site in 1996. The full history, treated with the seriousness it demands, is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓Western Honshu: Hiroshima, reborn after the atomic bomb as a city of peace, and the sacred island of Miyajima with its floating torii.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Long before its name became tied forever to the atomic age, Hiroshima was a thriving castle town for more than three centuries. Its story begins in 1589, when the powerful warlord Mori Terumoto, one of the great daimyos of western Japan, chose the delta of the Ota River, beside the Seto Inland Sea, to build his new castle and capital. The site was a plain of islands and river channels, which gave the town the name he chose for it: 'Hiroshima', meaning 'broad island'.
Hiroshima Castle, finished around 1599, was an imposing fortress built on the plain with a five-storey keep, very different from the mountain castles of the time. Terumoto's luck soon changed, though. He sided with the losing camp at the decisive Battle of Sekigahara in 1600, and Tokugawa Ieyasu, Japan's new ruler, took most of his lands from him. The castle then passed to other hands, and from 1619 it was held by the Asano clan, who governed the Hiroshima domain throughout the Edo period, right up to the Meiji Restoration.
Under the Asano, Hiroshima grew into the region's administrative, commercial and port centre. The lords laid out gardens such as Shukkeien (1620), encouraged trade across the Inland Sea and built a prosperous castle town. For more than two and a half centuries it was one of the leading cities of western Japan, with its feudal life, its merchants and its craftsmen, and no idea of the fate that awaited it in the 20th century.
The Meiji Restoration of 1868 and the end of the feudal system transformed Hiroshima. The city modernised, was linked to the railway and developed its port at nearby Ujina, which made it a key gateway to mainland Asia. But what would define its 20th century was its growing military importance. The castle became home to garrisons and barracks, and Hiroshima turned into one of the main bases of the Imperial Japanese Army.
During the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895), the Imperial General Headquarters and even a temporary seat of the Diet (the parliament) moved to Hiroshima for a time, because the city was a major logistics base and the place where troops boarded ships for the mainland. Over the following decades the city grew stronger as a military, industrial and port centre, with factories, arsenals and army units. Its population passed 300,000.
In the final weeks of the Second World War, this role as a major military and war-production centre is what marked it as a target. In the summer of 1945, Hiroshima was one of the few large Japanese cities that had not yet suffered heavy bombing. Tragically, that made it ideal for the United States to measure the effect of a new weapon on an undamaged city. The city's history was about to split in two.
On 6 August 1945, at 8:15 in the morning, a US B-29 bomber named Enola Gay, commanded by Colonel Paul Tibbets, dropped a uranium atomic bomb code-named 'Little Boy' on central Hiroshima. It detonated about 600 metres above the ground, almost directly over the city centre. It was the first time in history that a nuclear weapon had been used against a population. Three days later, on 9 August, a second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki.
The effects were devastating. The explosion released enormous energy as a blinding flash, a heat wave of thousands of degrees and a blast wave that flattened everything for kilometres around. Almost every building in the centre was destroyed or damaged, and fires broke out that burned whatever was still standing. Casualty figures are hard to pin down and vary between sources, but an estimated 70,000 people died instantly or within hours. By the end of 1945 the toll had risen to around 140,000, as people died from burns, injuries and the effects of radiation. Many of the victims were civilians: women, the elderly and children, as well as forced labourers and prisoners of war.
This section deals with an event of enormous gravity, and it deserves to be told accurately and without sensationalism. The survivors, known in Japanese as 'hibakusha' ('bomb-affected people'), carried physical after-effects and radiation-related illnesses for the rest of their lives, along with social stigma. Their testimonies, gathered over the years, became one of the most important voices in the worldwide movement for nuclear disarmament. On 15 August 1945, Japan announced its surrender, and the Second World War came to an end.
In the days after the bombing, some believed Hiroshima would stay uninhabitable for decades. But the city was not abandoned. Little by little, survivors and returning residents began rebuilding their lives among the ruins, and plants grew back sooner than many had feared, a sign of hope that stayed in the collective memory. Rebuilding was long and hard, but Hiroshima came back to life.
A turning point came in 1949, when the Japanese parliament passed the Hiroshima Peace Memorial City Construction Law. The law set the new city's course: not just to rebuild, but to do so with a stated purpose, to become a world symbol of the hope for peace and for the abolition of nuclear weapons. It was a remarkable decision that turned the worst of memories into a message for the future.
On the most devastated area, the old Nakajima district, almost directly below the hypocentre, the city decided not to rebuild housing and to create the Peace Memorial Park instead. It was designed by the architect Kenzo Tange and opened in the 1950s. With its Cenotaph, its Memorial Museum (1955), the Flame of Peace (lit in 1964, to burn until the last nuclear weapon is gone) and its monuments, the park became the symbolic heart of the city. Every year the 6 August ceremony, with a minute of silence at 8:15 and lanterns floated down the rivers, brings together thousands of people and dignitaries from around the world.
One of the few structures left standing near the hypocentre was the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall, a 1915 building with a distinctive dome. The bomb exploded almost directly above it. Because the blast came straight down, parts of its walls and the metal frame of the dome held up, though everyone inside was killed. That skeletal ruin, standing in the middle of the scorched emptiness, at once became an unforgettable image of what had happened.
For years the city debated what to do with it. For some survivors, the ruin reopened wounds that were too painful, and they wanted it pulled down. Others felt it had to be kept as a permanent warning for future generations. The words of a young girl who had died from radiation, and who had written about the need to preserve the building, helped tip the balance. In 1966 the city council decided to keep the structure for good, and since then it has been stabilised regularly without changing how it looks.
In 1996 UNESCO added the Dome to the World Heritage List under its official name, Hiroshima Peace Memorial (Genbaku Dome). The listing caused some international debate, but it was justified by the monument's unique value as a witness to the most destructive force humans have ever created, and as a symbol of hope for world peace and for the final elimination of nuclear weapons. Today the Dome still stands just as it was left, watched in silence by millions of visitors.
21st-century Hiroshima is a lively city of about 1.2 million people. It is the capital of its region and the economic engine of western Japan, with industry, universities and a busy cultural life. Nothing in its everyday look recalls the devastation of 1945: wide tree-lined avenues, trams running across town, bustling shopping centres and a food scene with real local pride, from okonomiyaki to Inland Sea oysters. It is living proof that a city can be completely reborn after the worst of disasters.
But Hiroshima has never set aside its mission of memory and peace. Its mayors have been leading voices in the global movement against nuclear weapons, and the city sends a letter of protest every time a country carries out a nuclear test. In 2016 US President Barack Obama visited the Memorial Park, the first visit by a sitting US president, and in 2023 the city hosted the G7 summit, with world leaders gathered at the Peace Museum. These moments have strengthened Hiroshima's role as a place where the world reflects on disarmament.
For travellers, Hiroshima offers an unusual experience: a place that challenges and moves you, where the memory of an immense tragedy sits alongside the energy of a city that chose the future and hope. Walking through the Peace Park, hearing the survivors' voices through the museum and then heading out to eat amid the local bustle is how you understand Hiroshima's core message. It is not one of resentment, but one of warning, and a deep wish that what happened never happens again, anywhere.
