Hiroshima: a city that chose to remember out loud

At 8:15 on 6 August 1945 the bomb detonated almost directly above what is now the A-Bomb Dome, and the building's skeletal ribs were left standing precisely because the blast came from overhead. Hiroshima decided not to clear it. The ruin anchors the north end of the Peace Memorial Park, a green wedge between two rivers holding the arched cenotaph, the children's monument hung with folded paper cranes, and a flame meant to burn until the last nuclear weapon is gone. The museum inside is direct and hard to walk out of unchanged — a wristwatch stopped at 8:15, a school uniform, testimony recorded by survivors now in their eighties.

What surprises most visitors is how thoroughly alive the rest of the city is. Trams, a few of them from the 1940s, still rattle along Aioi-dori beside the Hondori arcade; the covered arcade is full on a Tuesday evening; and Hiroshima-yaki is a genuinely different dish from its Osaka cousin — the batter, cabbage, pork and a nest of fried noodles are built up in layers rather than mixed, then turned onto a layer of fried egg. Okonomimura, a building stacked with rival griddle counters, exists purely for it.

Beyond the centre, Shukkeien is a compact strolling garden of miniature landscapes that had to be replanted after the war, and Hiroshima Castle was rebuilt on its original moated footprint (its 1958 keep has been closed to visitors since March 2026; the grounds stay open). The city sits on the Seto Inland Sea, so oysters are the local speciality in winter, grilled in their shells at street stalls. The ferry to Miyajima leaves from Miyajimaguchi, twenty-five minutes west. Give Hiroshima a full day; the morning is heavy, and the evening is the answer to it.