Japan's city of resilience — Peace Memorial Park, Miyajima's floating torii at high tide, and okonomiyaki layered on an iron griddle
Hiroshima is one of the most powerful cities in Japan — and not only because of its atomic history. It is a genuinely beautiful, liveable, and food-obsessed city on the Ōta River delta (seven rivers branch through it like fingers reaching the Seto Inland Sea) where the vast majority of visitors focus exclusively on the Peace Memorial and miss the real city entirely. Hiroshima's food culture is one of Japan's most distinctive: Hiroshima-style okonomiyaki (Hiroshima yaki) is architecturally different from the Osaka version — where Osaka mixes all ingredients together, Hiroshima layers them: a t…
Hiroshima was founded as a castle town in 1589 by feudal lord Mōri Terumoto and grew into one of Japan's major industrial cities by the early 20th century. On August 6, 1945 at 8:15am, the United States dropped the first atomic bomb used in warfare ('Little Boy') directly over the city — approximately 70,000 people died instantly, and the total death toll reached 90,000–140,000 by the end of 1945. The Genbaku Dome (Hiroshima Peace Memorial), the ruins of the Industrial Promotion Hall that was directly beneath the blast and somehow survived with its iron frame intact, was preserved by the city…