Exploring A Resurrected City Blissful Travels In Hiroshima

A formerly devastated city managed to pick up its pieces in a way that’s beyond admirable. Right now, Hiroshima is one of the main cultural hotspots on Japan’s largest island Honshu. By Huub Lakerveld

- Huub Lakerveld

Hiroshima might never fully recover from the lethal blade that stabbed the city’s heart on August 6, 1945, when the first atomic bomb was dropped on a once prosperous and artsy municipality. Pre-bombed Hiroshima was stylish, with a humming downtown area and Hondori, known for its enchanting lily-of-the-valley street lanterns, wiped out in an instant when Enola Gay dropped the bomb and it ignited in a pulverising shockwave of light and heat brought on by the A-bomb blast.

The unhealed scar and shattered dreams of countless souls who lost their lives in the blast is memorialized in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. Macabre images, dark halls, and agonising stories show the brutal hell Hiroshima’s people suffered in the aftermath. The city has picked itself up and has blossomed over time in the wake of such brutality, leaving hardly any visible proof of the past horror. Still, the museum is an incredible setting to begin to understand modern Hiroshima, its culture and its citizens.

Outside the museum, stroll on the shores of the river to witness the A-Bomb Dome; once a prestigious exhibition hall, now a frightening concrete carcass, left as a symbol of massdestruction.

SAKE BREWERIES – HIROSHIMA’S MONUMENTAL BEVERAGE