Hiroshima, Japan

Hiroshima, the tenth-largest city in Japan, is located on the Seto Inland Sea and is the capital of Hiroshima Prefecture. With a 2007 population of 1.16 million people, Hiroshima is the largest city in the Chugoku region of western Honshu Island and is the commercial and cultural hub of western Japan. The automobile manufacturer Mazda is headquartered in Hiroshima and accounts for roughly one third of the city's economic base. In 1945, Hiroshima became the first city in the world to be attacked with nuclear weapons. Hiroshima is today known worldwide as a Peace Memorial City. Its municipal government and civic groups, especially those begun by Hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors), have historically been at the forefront of global efforts to abolish nuclear weapons.

Hiroshima is of particular importance in Urban Studies for two reasons: Hiroshima demonstrates the temporality of existing city centers because the destruction of the nuclear attack was more absolute than that of the fire bombing inflicted on most Japanese cities in World War II and because hilly Nagasaki, which was also hit with an atomic bomb, retained some previous structures. In addition, said to be uninhabitable for decades after the attack, the city nevertheless survived and rebuilt, offering a blank slate to city planners. It provides an example of an urban area sustaining and recovering from unique challenges presented by modern warfare.

Hiroshima is a river delta town, located at the mouth of the Ota River, built on land reclaimed from the Seto Inland Sea. In 1589, the local daimyo (feudal lord) Mori Terumoto changed the name of the town to Hiroshima (“wide island”) and began construction of Hiroshima castle, which would anchor urban development for generations. In 1871, during the Meiji period, feudal domains were abolished and Hiroshima Prefecture was established, and in 1889, the city of Hiroshima formally gained municipality status.

On August 6, 1945, Hiroshima was attacked by the United States, which dropped a single atomic bomb on the city. It was the first city in the world to have been attacked with a nuclear weapon. This single bomb unleashed destructive power equivalent to 15,000 tons of TNT, destroying 69 percent [Page 358]of the city's buildings and killing or injuring more than 300,000 people. During the war, Hiroshima was among a small number of towns removed from U.S. conventional and fire bombing target lists to provide undamaged targets that would facilitate later atomic bomb damage assessments. The important military facilities located in Hiroshima during the time of the bombing were not targeted (and largely survived), but rather, the bomb was aimed at the city center. On August 9, 1945, the world's first plutonium bomb, nicknamed the “Fat Man,” was dropped on Nagasaki, the second and last city to be attacked with a nuclear weapon. There is widespread disagreement about the extent to which the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki led to the end of World War II.

After the end of the war, Hiroshima moved fairly rapidly from a population low of 137,000 in late 1945 to the vibrant city that it is today. In 1949, first the city government and then national government declared Hiroshima a Peace Memorial City, and construction was begun on the Peace Memorial Park to honor the victims of the bombing. In 1996, the Atomic Bomb Dome, a former industrial promotion center near the hypocenter of the blast, whose mangled shell was preserved after the war, was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

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