I felt strange before I even arrived.
Seeing Hiroshima on the road signs was surreal. The name carries too much weight to be just a normal place name. It shouldn’t sit there beside apartment blocks, shops, and people going about their day.
But of course it does. That was the thing I couldn’t really get past.
Part of me expected Hiroshima to feel like a museum. Stopped in time. Not because people shouldn’t live there. Not because life shouldn’t have continued. But because the devastation was so vast, and the events there so profound, that some irrational part of me couldn’t understand how ordinary life could coexist alongside the history.
That was what made it so difficult for me to be there.
Hiroshima was ordinary, and not ordinary at all. At the same time.
The Flame of Peace was the first thing I saw in the park.
I noticed the geometry first, I think. The grey concrete, the strong lines, the stillness around it. And then the flame itself, bright and moving in the middle of all that austerity.
It felt very alive. Small, but significant.
I kept coming back to that contrast. The severe concrete and living flame. The grey weight of the place, and the one moving point of light.
The Memorial Hall was almost empty when I went in.
I hadn’t expected that. After the bustle of the city outside the quiet felt solid.
Inside, there is a 360-degree image of Hiroshima after the bombing etched into the walls. Beneath it are thousands of tiles. One hundred and forty thousand of them. Each representing a life lost.
Numbers that large are incomprehensible. Abstract. Until I saw them set out like that.
That was what undid me. The scale of it.
Coming out of the Memorial Hall into the autumn sunshine was jarring. Inside everything had been quiet and still. Outside, the city was bright and busy and full of people looking for coffee.
However, now I wasn’t really walking. I was moving in a daze without understanding how. Not taking in anything of the busy and jostling people.
That was the part I struggled with most. The devastation held inside the Hall, and ordinary life immediately outside it.
Then I saw him.
A Japanese man standing on a busy corner, wearing a T-shirt that said Free Hugs. He kept pointing at it and leaping about energetically, as waves of tourists parted around him, pretending very hard that they couldn’t see him.
I made straight for him. We made eye contact and both stepped into a hug that lasted a very long time.
We smiled at each other as we stepped back, and I walked on, back into the flow of people. Brought back to myself a bit by that very human moment of comfort and connection.
A bit further on a group of children were eating their lunch on the river bank opposite the Atomic Bomb (Genbaku) Dome.
They were obviously there on a school trip. White hats, bright bags, packed lunches, teachers keeping everything organised. After the stillness of the Memorial Hall, their quiet normality really stayed with me.
Just ordinary life, right there. Children eating lunch across from the devastated building.
I really can’t explain why that moved me so much.
When I reached the Atomic Bomb Dome, I wanted my photographs to capture how it felt to stand there.
The broken frame.
The empty windows.
The shape of it against the sky.
The skeleton of the dome with the light catching it.
By now I was empty. Everything had been intensified. The quiet, the crowds, the history, the hug, the children, the Dome, the flame. I was completely done in.
The last thing I saw before leaving was a rose, in the garden of remembrance next to the shattered Genbaku Dome.
Yellow petals. Starting to open. It was soft, delicate and beautiful. And I was glad it was there.