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“The entire city had been burned to the ground,” says Ogura, one of many hibakusha – the Japanese name given to people exposed to radiation – who pass on their experience to visitors. With the exception of a handful of concrete buildings, Hiroshima had ceased to exist.Ī day after the attack, Keiko Ogura, then an eight-year-old schoolgirl, could barely believe her eyes as she looked down on her hometown from a hill. Wooden homes had been burnt to the ground by firestorms the city’s rivers were filled with the corpses of people desperately seeking water before they died. What a day earlier had been a sprawling military city and transportation hub, wedged between mountain ranges to the north and the Seto inland sea to the south, was now a nuclear wasteland. Photographs: Yoshita Kishimoto/Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum

Hiroshima in October 1945, April 1946, December 1948 and February 1953. Of the 33m square metres of land considered usable before the attack, 40% was reduced to ashes. About 90% of the city’s 76,000 buildings were partially or totally incinerated, or reduced to rubble. Within half an hour, almost every building within a two-kilometre radius of the hypocentre was in flames. Winds of up to 440 metres per second roared through the entire city. Less than a minute later, the bomb exploded 600 metres above Shima Hospital, creating a wave of heat that momentarily reached 3,000-4,000 degrees centigrade on the ground. Humans destroyed Hiroshima, but humans also rebuilt it Kazumi Matsui These harrowing exhibits are among the few physical reminders of the devastation that greeted survivors after the US B-29 bomber Enola Gay released Little Boy, a 16-kilotonne atomic bomb, over Hiroshima at 8.15am on 6 August 1945. Display cases show the shredded remains of a junior high-school uniform, the irradiated contents of a lunchbox and the frame of a tricycle – the small boy riding it was incinerated by the blast. South-west of the station, visitors to the city’s Peace Memorial Museum fall silent in front of steps retrieved from the ruins of Sumitomo Bank, the “shadow” of a human etched into the stone.