The A-Bomb Dome is an iconic ruin and solemn reminder of Aug. 6, 1945. Seemingly a lone holdout from another time, it’s surrounded by tall, modern buildings and across from it is a serene park dedicated to peace. It feels like, and is sometimes referred to as, the only structure left standing after the bombing… but I had a hard time believing that.
I was curious so looking into it I found that wasn’t the case. Hiroshima City recognizes 90 structures within 5 km of the hypocenter as bomb survivors and several of them house museums that share their atomic bomb story.
A million people visit Hiroshima every year to learn about the atomic bombing by visiting the Peace Museum and walking around its park, which I’ve done, but now I wanted to go back and learn about the bombing in a different way. Instead of seeing a curated collection gathered from around the city in a custom-built facility, I wanted to see the places that survived the bomb, learn their stories and see it from those perspectives.
Three museums less than .5 km from the hypocenter where chosen for my two day trip, which turned into four museums with an accidental discovery by my wife. We began with Honkawa Elementary School Peace Museum.
Honkawa National School (Elementary School) was special. Built in 1928, it was the first of its kind in Hiroshima, a modern three-story ferroconcrete school. It stood near the bank of the Honkawa River, just opposite the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall on the other side of the T-shaped Aioi Bridge. Sandwiched on the island between the Honkawa and Motoyasu rivers the bridge spanned was Nakajima-honmachi, a lively neighborhood of movie theaters, restaurants and shops. To the left of the promotion hall were the Imperial Japanese Army 5th Division drill grounds and barracks, which extended out to Hiroshima Castle, one of the few standing original castles in Japan and the division headquarters.
Aioi Bridge’s peculiar T-shape was bombardier Thomas Ferebee’s aim point when he released the Little Boy uranium bomb over it at 8:15 a.m. It sailed over the bridge and detonated at a point just beyond the promotion hall, where Shima Hospital stands, on an incognito side street.
The atomic blast generated heat like a miniature sun, immediately igniting everything flammable within 2 km and ripping through the Hall, which is cocked at angle, its nearest side taking the brunt and losing everything down to the first story and giving the building it’s now distinct lop-sided appearance. It incinerated the movie theaters, restaurants and shops of Nakajima-honmachi, blew through the barracks and torched the venerable old castle, leaving nothing standing of what had once been a base capable of moving 20,000 troops a day. And Honkawa National School, 410 meters away, took it on the long-side of its L-shaped school building. It was still standing when it was over, but the intense heat and shockwave went through the school itself. The glass windows shattered and everything was sent flying. Of the 410 students and faculty playing in the school yard and attending classes, except for one teacher and 11-year old student Kiyoko Imori (née Tsuitsui), all were either killed instantly or would die within days.
The interior of an elementary school classroom, similar to those at Honkawa. This preserved example is at Toyosato Elementary School.
Imori, and her friend Kazuko Aohara, survived because they were still inside the school changing shoes when the bomb detonated.
When she came outside, the whole neighborhood and school was on fire. It was all extremely hot and two female teachers told the girls to get in the river. As they headed to it a blackened, unidentifiable person came alongside them. Imori asked who she was and was horrified when the person, a she, identified herself as “Takagi.” The girl burned beyond recognition was her classmate. She and Aohara got in the river and waited there for hours, unfazed by the passing corpses, before getting back out and being taken away. Aohara died about10 days later.
After the flames were put out, Honkawa was pressed into service as a first aid station and field hospital for handling survivors. Classes began again in the school’s blackened, windowless shell in February 1946. Repair would take years and the school continued to serve the community until 1988 when it was replaced with a new building, but recognizing the historic importance of the old school, a section of the first floor and basement have been preserved as a peace museum.
When I visited, before heading to the museum we met the school principal and he took on a short tour to share Honkawa’s unique elevated view of the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall, now better known as the A-Bomb Dome. As he walked us to the spot to see the dome, he noted where during the excavation for the new school construction in the 1980s they found more bodies that had been left there after the bombing and subsequently covered over and buried.
I suppose when you live next to a famous landmark, regardless of its meaning, you just get used to it. Despite the constant reminder for people here life went on, children continued to attend class in the same building and play in the same place where others had been when they died that day and probably don’t even think about it. Though, the principal had lost relatives in the bombing. He said sometimes he comes up here and seeing it creates complicated feelings and he feels hollow inside.
A view of the A-Bomb Dome from Honkawa Elementary School’s second floor.
This was the first time I’d had to visit an active school, with children playing and attending class, to see a museum. The preserved square of browned old school is surrounded on all sides by the modern buildings and sits in its own little plaza with a palm tree and memorial. It’s been stripped bare to the darkened ferroconcrete that kept it standing when little else did. Inside as well, it’s been brought back to its pockmarked base two-tone grey finish and inside and out it feels like a bomb just went off.
Part of the preserved basement
The little first floor museum focuses on the school and its children’s story from the pre-bombing evacuations to its post-war recovery. This is accompanied by lots of pictures that illustrate the period. It would have been easy to play emotions in a place like this, but they don’t and tell their story in a straightforward manner making it easy to appreciate what these kids went through and how they pulled through after. This museum is almost entirely bilingual and well-translated.
An artifact room displays many items you’d see in either of the big peace museums in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but unlike those museums these small, personal artifacts belong here. This school is their context. There are also more pictures of the bombing’s aftermath including a before and after of the area.
A collection of uniform buttons.
Skeletal Type 30 rifle found on the school grounds. The Type 30 was the precursor to the standard issue Type 99.
This is also where I first began really paying attention to building orientation relative to the hypocenter, something I’d continue to do for the rest of my trip. A wall map shows that this preserved section is the “armpit” of the old L-shaped school, where Imori and Aohara where during the bombing, and was the furthest from the blast and most protected point of the school. This was the difference between walking away unscathed, saved for the radiation exposure, and someone a dozen yards in the wrong direction dying immediately.
After the artifact room the tour route leads down to the basement, which is even barer than the upper floor and has spotty lighting, lending to the mood. A few blackened points on the walls down here are pointed out as evidence of the intense heat they endured. The emptiness and darkness combined with the stripped rooms make it that much more somber and the few items on display stand out all the more. A cavernous, dark and bare room holds the biggest post-bombing topographic model of Hiroshima I’d ever seen (there’s a few out there) and against a wall are a few touchable bits of column from the A-Bomb Dome that were pulled from the river in 2009. A sign invites visitors to touch the stone and feel how the bomb scorched the once smooth granite rough and to think about pre-War Hiroshima and the bombing.
The building with a white card on it is Honkawa.
Though it receives 26,000 visitors a year, mostly in August, when I visited with my wife we were the only people there. She waited for me upstairs by the entrance as I walked around so I had the basement to myself. It was very quiet as well as dark, not the ‘horror movie’ kind of dark, just contemplative.
I’d felt a bomb before once in Iraq, it was a large vehicle-borne IED that went off some kilometers away but it felt like the building beside us exploded. I remember the sound, the vibration and feeling it. Standing in the basement I couldn’t imagine what the atomic bomb would have felt like with such a greater magnitude of power that my own point of reference.
The post-bombing city model very clearly shows the brutal effectiveness of the Little Boy bomb in reducing a city to ash and rubble. There are single buildings, like Honkawa, here and there for the most part, but the area near the hypocenter itself had a decent cluster of surviving structures. Two of which are now museums. This was my next destination, Fukuro-machi.
Visiting Honkawa Peace Museum can be done without a reservation, but I recommend calling the school ahead of time if possible. It is an active school and is subject to the school’s availability. Because of this it is also only open during school hours. English-capability of the school personnel is spotty, but you should be able to make your intentions understood. Also, please do not go wandering around or go into the other buildings without permission. The school museum is free.
Though she survived, Kiyoko Imori immediately began experiencing trouble in life due to her experience. She is a hibakusha, an atomic bomb survivor. Because she was radiated and radiation was, and to an extent still is, not well understood she and her fellow survivors were shunned and stigmatized by their fellow countrymen almost like modern-day lepers. (Incidentally, Japan only ended the practice of forcing lepers to live in sanitariums in 1996.) Employment and marriage opportunities were fewer for them, and even their children, because of the fear they’d been tainted by radiation, as if touching them or being around them could radiate you too. To get away from this, she left Hiroshima and started over in Yokohama, where she still lives with her husband.
She was fine for almost three decades, despite receiving a potentially lethal dose of 4.9 sieverts of radiation, but like with my own grandfather, it caught up to her later. First a tumor and then various cancers which still afflict her today.
To learn more about her I recommend the two below stories, which I used as reference when writing about her. Initially the principal had shared her story with us and it’s in the school’s English pamphlet but I wanted to learn more about her before writing so I looked her up.
http://www.hiroshimastories.com/?p=495
To get a map of Hiroshima bomb surviving structures and trees check out the Hiroshima Peace Pocket Guide: https://www.city.hiroshima.lg.jp/site/english/9666.html
Below is a site with information on the surviving buildings if you want to visit them. Wish I’d found it before my trip, but it will be helpful if I ever go back.
https://www.hiroshima-navi.or.jp/en/sightseeing/hibaku_ireihi/tatemono/
ADDRESS
Honkawa Elementary School Peace Museum
1-5-39 Honkawa-cho, Naka-ku, Hiroshima City 730-0802
082-232-3431