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Hiroshima
Hiroshima was founded in 1589 on the del-
ta formed by the Ota River, flowing out to
the Seto Inland Sea. The warlord Mori Ter-
umoto built a castle there, only to lose it
Hiroshima is an industrial city of wide boule- eleven years later to Tokugawa Ieyasu af-
vards and criss-crossing rivers, located along ter the Battle of Sekigahara, which marked
the coast of the Seto Inland Sea. Although the beginning of the Tokugawa shogunate.
many only know it for the horrific split second Control of the area was given to the Asano
on August 6, 1945 when it became the site clan of samurai, who ruled without much in-
of the world’s first atomic bomb attack, it is cident for the next two and a half centuries.
now a modern cosmopolitan city with excel- On 6 August 1945 at 8:15AM the American
lent cuisine and a bustling nightlife. Those B-29 bomber Enola Gay dropped an atom-
expecting to step off the Shinkansen into ic bomb dubbed “Little Boy” on Hiroshima.
a pile of smoldering rubble will be in for a It is estimated that at least 70,000 people
surprise, as Hiroshima has all the ferrocon- were killed in the explosion and its immedi-
crete and blinking neon of any other mod- ate aftermath. Most of the city was built of
ern Japanese city. hapless salarymen rush wood, and fires raged out of control across
down Aioi-dori to their next meeting, casting nearly five square miles, leaving behind a
a bloodshot eye toward the seedy bars of charred plain with a few scattered concrete
Nagarekawa as they pass. At first glance, it structures. Corpses lay piled in rivers; med-
can be hard to imagine that anything out of
ical treatment was virtually non-existent, as
