Hiroshima, The Peace Park & Miyajima

Hiroshima and the Peace Memorial Park

Hiroshima is a place known worldwide for the wrong reasons, the utter devastation caused by the Atomic Bomb being dropped there on August 6th 1945. We have been interested in going to visit the memorial park and learn about what happened since first thinking about going to Japan.

We got the two-hour train from Kyoto, straight to Hiroshima, dropped our bags at the Hostel then headed straight out to the city. The first thing that strikes you is that it’s a very modern and rich city, most likely because there is not really a single building there older than 70 years old, because the bomb wiped out the entire city.

The peace park and museum is being used to remember the victims and showcase the devastation caused by war, rather than discuss the topic of that particular war, it is very interesting to see and also saddening to learn in-depth what it did to the people of Hiroshima.

Within a 4km radius of the blast, almost everything and everybody was completely destroyed by either the immense heat, the blast forces or the radiation, of the 350,000 people living in Hiroshima at the time, 150,000 of them had died by the end of 1945, and the effects were still being seen decades later. There is no final figure of the cost to human life by the bomb.

Panoramic Images of the City after the Bomb

Peace Memorial Park with the A-Bomb Dome in the Distance

Miyajima Island

About thirty minutes by train from Hiroshima is the ferry port to the island of Miyajima. We got the ferry over to have a look around the famous Itsukushima shrine, another UNESCO world heritage site. The Torri gate can be seen from almost as soon as you are on the water, the small village on the island is very beautiful with stunning landscapes, it also has wild deer roaming around it.

The Itsukushima shrine is floating out on the front of the island with many areas to walk around, right on the sea. The five storey pagoda is in the background. I think this is one of the most beautiful shrine we saw in Japan, being directly on the water made it seem so peaceful.