Exploring Hiroshima

STEPHEN CORBY goes from devastation to delight with chef Ben Shewry

Honolulu is fortunate enough to be famous for more than just one bloody day; the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. But Hiroshima is a city that will always be synonymous with one devastating date.

It is impossible to visit this bustling, modern city – the eleventh largest in Japan, with a population of 1.1 million – without considering its painful place in history, as the location of the most shocking, truly unprecedented crime against humanity, the dropping of an atomic bomb on a civilian population, an attack that killed as many as 100,000 people on August 6, 1945, with at least another 80,000 dying more slowly by the end of that year, from burns, injuries and radiation poisoning. 

It also completely flattened, or torched, 70 per cent of all the buildings in Hiroshima, as its vast fireball burned to almost 4000 degrees Celsius. Pretty much everything you see in the city, then, is much younger than the rest of Japan. Even the beautiful Hiroshima Castle, originally built in the 1590s, was painstakingly rebuilt to look like its former glory, back in the 1950s.

Among the many incredible things you are reminded of in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum - a place you really must visit and one dedicated, most obviously, to ridding the modern world of nuclear weapons - is that the unfeasible, inhuman toll of the atomic bomb was not enough to scare the Japanese into ending the war.

Three days later, the US dropped another fire storm of fission on Nagasaki but it took another six days after that for Emperor Hirohito to announce Japan's surrender.