By Adam Beck
Hiroshima Peace Site (the website for Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum)
The official English site for Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum badly needs an overhaul to make it more attractive and user-friendly, but it does have a lot of information, if you’re willing to dig a little. Take a look at the Peace Database for photos of the bombing and drawings made by the survivors, or the Kids Peace Station for information more suitable for children.
Hiroshima National Peace Memorial Hall for the Atomic Bomb Victims
Peace Memorial Hall is located in Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, not far from Peace Memorial Museum. The museum is usually the main stop for visitors to Hiroshima, with its focus on A-bomb artifacts. But the newer hall, with the mission of conveying the survivors’ accounts of the bombing, is also of interest. (Because it’s an underground facility, the entrance can be hard to spot. Online, the hall offers a number of videos of survivors’ testimonies, with English narration (http://www.global-peace.go.jp/en/picture/index.html).
Launched in 2008, the Hiroshima Peace Media Center is a wing of the Chugoku Shimbun, the Hiroshima-area newspaper. The Peace Media Center maintains a bilingual English-Japanese website and offers a wealth of information, both current and historical, on the atomic bombing, nuclear weapons, nuclear energy, and peace issues. At this link (http://www.hiroshimapeacemedia.jp) are four videos of A-bomb survivors describing their experiences in English.
The Chugoku Shimbun also maintained this “Children’s peace newspaper” from 2007 to 2012 The project ended this past spring. The online version is still available, though, in both English and Japanese, with every issue that was published. (Full disclosure: I wrote a column for Peace Seeds called “English Challenge”, about expressing Hiroshima’s history and other peace issues in English. It can be accessed at the Japanese version of the website.)
Since only a small handful of photos were taken in the city on the day Hiroshima was bombed, the best evidence of the horrific conditions comes from the drawings of A-bomb survivors. This is a thoughtful collection of such drawings from noted historian John Dower.
Memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Developed by the Asahi Shimbun, this site provides numerous written accounts of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
An excellent online resource for information about the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The above link to the city’s official English website is absurdly long, but the site itself provides a lot of useful information, and links, about life in Hiroshima.
The Hiroshima Convention & Visitors Bureau is behind this comprehensive website for tourists. The information is available in several other languages, too, beyond English and Japanese.
Maintained by an energetic pair of international residents in Hiroshima, this website offers useful information about the city, in English, for visitors and locals. Categories include dining, nightlife, museums and attractions, events, etc. If you’re planning a trip to Hiroshima, this website could be a helpful resource
EDUCATION IN JAPAN COMMUNITY Blog 