Hiroshima rose from a delta castle to a peace city
Founded in 1589 by Mōri Terumoto on the Ōta River delta, Hiroshima means 'wide island.' It became a Meiji industrial and military hub, was destroyed by the first nuclear weapon used in war on 6 August 1945, and later rebuilt as western Honshu's largest city.
A fishing village on Hiroshima Bay grew wealthy from the twelfth century beside Mitaki-dera. Terumoto built Hiroshima Castle and moved in by 1593; after Sekigahara, Tokugawa Ieyasu stripped him of the domain. The han's 1871 abolition made the town prefectural capital; city status came in 1889. The San'yō Railway arrived in 1894, and during the First Sino-Japanese War Emperor Meiji kept headquarters at the castle from 15 September 1894. About 500 German POWs were held on Ninoshima in World War I. By 1942 population peaked near 419,000.
On 6 August 1945 at 8:15 a.m., the B-29 Enola Gay, piloted by Paul Tibbets, dropped the uranium bomb Little Boy. Immediate deaths numbered at least about 70,000; by year's end estimates range from about 90,000 to 166,000. Occupation censors limited film and casualty data until the 1951 San Francisco Treaty. John Hersey's Hiroshima filled an entire New Yorker issue on 31 August 1946. The Makurazaki Typhoon on 17 September 1945 killed or injured more than 3,000 in the prefecture and wrecked over half the city's bridges.
The 1949 Hiroshima Peace Memorial City Construction Law funded rebuilding on former military land. The Genbaku Dome and Peace Memorial Park, museum (1955), and a 1966 steel Peace Pagoda anchor remembrance; oleander is the civic flower as the first bloom after the blast. Parliament named Hiroshima a City of Peace in 1949 under mayor Shinzo Hamai. Population fell to about 137,000 in 1945, recovered to pre-war levels by 1955, and stood near 1.18 to 1.20 million in recent counts across about 905 square kilometres.
Source: Hiroshima
