TN 360 °: Hiroshima 74 years after the nuclear bomb

It is summer and it is very hot in this region of Japan. With temperatures above 34 ° C and humidity of 90%It is perfectly normal to see people walking with umbrellas to protect themselves from the sun.

Hiroshima today does not look very different from another Japanese city with its wide avenues, high-speed train linking it to the rest of the country, large parks and extremely clean sidewalks. It is a large city of 1.5 million inhabitants but quite small compared to other megacities such as Tokyo, Yokohama or Osaka which concentrate a large part of the population.

The growth that the Asian country has known since the mid-1950s and the decisions of various leaders on what should and should not be done with the reconstruction of the city after the Second World War largely concealed the traces of Atomic bomb disaster this morning of August 1945. The fight and the order of the survivors They have made it possible today to be the symbolic city of peace in the world and the elimination of nuclear weapons.

Hiroshima before the war

Because of its position near the river and the sea, Hiroshima has always been a city with intense commercial and industrial activity. The various wars in which Japan participated as Sino-Japanese (1894-1895) and Russian-Japanese (1904-1905) made this port one of the main producers of weapons in the world. Japanese empire.

In the decade of the 10th century, the construction of one of the representatives of this golden age of urban growth: the exhibition center of Hiroshima Prefecture (1915)under the direction of the Czech architect Jan Letzel. The building was built of brick and partially steel, covered with stones and a copper dome. The first floor was used for offices, while the second and third floors were for exhibitions of different products made in this Japanese prefecture. His architectural style of European design was a symbol of what society admired in an era of openness to the world, while the rest of the buildings were rather wooden and traditional Japanese style.
In 1934, the iconic building was used for different types of exhibitions and social events of the local community.

A 16 mm film of time, It shows a bit about the life of the Hiroshima society in 1935, with cherry blossoms (sakura), its bridges over the river running through the city and part of the daily life of this great port.

During the Second World War, Hiroshima retained its status as a city serving the Japanese empire. It meant that It was a key point for the production of weapons and supplies. However, during the war he had not suffered considerable damage, even though most of the houses were wooden. Hiroshima and Kyoto were the most vulnerable to bombing, but they remained intact.

That's why when choosing a goal, Hiroshima has become the ideal for the US Army. Alternative cities for the nuclear bomb were Kokura and Nagasaki.

After several reconnaissance flights, the bomber B-29 "Enola Gay" released the "Little Boy" nuclear charge on a city where 340 thousand people lived. It was 8:15 am August 6, 1945, the day the history course of this city changed forever.

The bomb exploded 600 meters above sea level with the energy of 16 kilotons of TNT, on one of the bridges 160 meters from the Hiroshima Exhibition Center. The destruction was total within a radius of 1.6 km and the buildings burned around 11 km.

It is estimated that between 70 and 80,000 people died at the time of the explosionwhile another 70,000 have been seriously injured and hundreds of thousands of people have had health problems for life. According to later studies, 69% of the city would have been completely destroyed, while 6% of the buildings would have suffered considerable damage.

For those who survived, known as hibakusha (person bombarded, in Japanese), was a hell on Earth. A large part of the city's doctors and nurses died from the explosion and the few survivors were unable to treat all the wounded. Journalist John Hersey, who arrived in Hiroshima 25 days after the nuclear explosion, recounted the horror with six testimonies published in The New Yorker in 1945, while the city was in chaos.

"The silence was scary:" Nobody shouted, no one ran. The survivors had no physical or psychological strength. They only murmured water to beg for water ", Setsuko Nakamura is recalled in 2017 when the International Campaign for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Setsuko Nakamura was 13 years old at the time of the blast. "As a high school student, I witnessed the destruction of my city and became the city of death."

Nagasaki would suffer the second nuclear explosion on August 9th. Japan would submit its surrender on August 15, 1945, ending the Pacific War.

World Heritage of UNESCO

Hiroshima is rebuilding quickly after the end of the Second World War. The exhibition center is one of the few buildings that can remain partly upright after the nuclear explosion. For a while, the big debate was what should be done with the remains of this building.

There were those who thought it was necessary to demolish it, because it brought sad and painful memories of total destruction. D & # 39; others, this should be preserved so that future generations know the damage that can be caused by nuclear weapons. It was only in 1966, 19 years after the bomb, that Hiroshima raised enough funds to turn the building into a monument of peace. "Preserving the dome is a means of transmitting a message of peace to future generations to the 200,000 souls who died as a result of atomic bombing", says the text.

Since 1996, the Hiroshima Exhibition Center, "Genbaku Domu", is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, symbol of world peace and the elimination of all nuclear weapons.

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