Hiroshima Peace Park Japan

Legendary

On August 6, 1945, Hiroshima was destroyed by an atomic bomb.

Photo by ajay_suresh

On August 6, 1945, at 8:15 in the morning, an atomic bomb exploded almost directly above this spot. Nearly everything around it was destroyed instantly.

One building didn't fall. Its dome sat almost exactly beneath the blast, so the force pushed straight down instead of sideways, and the frame held.

It had been an exhibition hall, built in 1915 by a Czech architect. Today people call it the Genbaku Dome, or the Atomic Bomb Dome.

The city chose to leave it exactly as it was. It has never been repaired, and it became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1996.

The park around it opened in the 1950s. It sits in what had been a busy shopping district before the bombing.

At the center stands a curved stone monument holding the names of everyone known to have died. Stand in the right spot and you can see the Genbaku Dome framed perfectly through its arch.

Nearby is the Children's Peace Monument, and its story belongs to a girl named Sadako Sasaki. She was two years old when the bomb fell about a mile from her home.

She survived and grew up healthy. Ten years later, at age eleven, she became seriously ill from the radiation.

In the hospital, Sadako started folding paper cranes. A Japanese tradition says that anyone who folds a thousand of them will be granted a wish, and hers was for a world without nuclear weapons.

She died in 1955. Her classmates raised money to build a monument, and it was unveiled in 1958.

People never stopped folding. Millions of paper cranes arrive at the monument every year, sent by children and schools from all over the world.

Walk the straight path from the museum to the cenotaph and look through the arch at the dome beyond. Visit the Peace Memorial Museum, where ordinary objects like a lunchbox and a child's tricycle tell the story more clearly than any statistic. Look closely at the cases of paper cranes around Sadako's statue, folded by strangers who wanted her wish to count.