The Hiroshima Memorial Park, built to commemorate the 8.15am, 6/8/45, A-Bomb blast which took place 580 metres in the air somewhere above the slender car-parking building marked 'P' in the bottom pic. The bomb should have exploded right above the bridge in Pic #3 (from the top), but I guess that's academic now. As a result some 140,000 citizens of Hiroshima perished (70,000 from the blast, 70,000 from radiation), and Hiroshima was decimated. Now a modern Hiroshima is a bustling and beautiful city, surrounded by mountains and the sea, with wide streets, trundling trams, rivers and waterways, and 1.1mil people.
I arrived at the city around 7.30pm, 8/8/04, aboard a bullet train from Osaka, oblivious to the fact that the city had just had its 59th a-bomb anniversary a couple of days before. Otherwise it would have been tough getting a room for the night. I ended up spending two nights in Hiroshima, and could not get over the fact that on 6/8/45 the whole city was obliterated, and had to be rebuilt from scratch - a testimony to the power of life over destruction.
