HIROSHIMA – THE PEACE CITY
On a cloudless sunny morning on August 6, 1945, Hiroshima became the first city in the world to be attacked with an atomic bomb. It flattened the city, instantly killing 30 per cent of its citizens. Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Museum documents the nuclear fallout with eyewitness accounts, incinerated shadows on stone walls (that were once people) and even pieces of flesh that melted off from radiation. It also details the recovery. The Japanese had electricity up in parts of the city the very next day, and some trolley lines running just three days after the blast. Twenty years later, the nation had spectacularly bounced back to become an economic superpower. In 2011 Japan was almost a victim of atomic power again when an earthquake and tsunami triggered a meltdown at the Fukushima reactor.