Japan

Peace Memorial Park stands as a silent appeal to eliminate all nuclear weapons and a plea for world peace. This part of Hiroshima was a bustling center of commerce for 240 years, beginning in 1603 with a steady stream of goods arriving by boat on the Ōta River. In the Meiji era that took root in 1868, this urban district morphed into the political guts of the prosperous city. The Prefectural Office was built here and City Hall as well. All that ended on August 6, 1945, when the world’s first atomic bomb was exploded directly over the Nakajima District. Why Hiroshima? By the summer of 1945, Germany and its European Allies were defeated, but the war in Asia and the Pacific fought. American leaders calculated that the only way to bring the war to an end in the Pacific Theater was to invade the Japanese homeland at the cost of tens of thousands of Allied lives. The alternative was the recently developed A-bomb, untested in actual warfare. Hiroshima was chosen as the target instead of Tokyo since the city had not yet been bombed, so the damage caused by an atomic strike could easily be measured for its effects.…