You always approach Hiroshima with a particular tension. You know why you’re going. You know what you’ll see, what you’ll feel. But Hiroshima isn’t a frozen memorial, it’s a city back on its feet, eating, drinking, screaming in the Carp baseball stands, and behind the Genbaku Dome, opening a direct door onto all of Setouchi. It’s probably the worst-told Japanese city: either a solemn pilgrimage or an express stop between Kyoto and Fukuoka. It deserves three days, and a wider view.
IkuzoHiroshima Is Much More Than The Bomb
Hiroshima was entirely rebuilt after 1945. Not restored, not patched up, remade. Avenues are wide, boulevards lined with trees, rivers left open. It’s one of the rare big Japanese cities where the urban plan can breathe. You quickly understand that the post-war project wasn’t only to raise the walls back up, but to set down a city that could, one day, talk about something other than itself.
It’s also an industrial city (Mazda has its headquarters here, the rotary engine was developed here), a sea city (Setouchi oysters represent 60% of Japan’s farmed production), an obsessive baseball city (the Carp are a local religion), and a dialect city (Hiroshima-ben replaces dakara with jakē, which always surprises visitors).
The Memorial Park, To Cross Slowly
Plan three hours minimum. Not one. Not two. Three. The park is calm, crossed by the Motoyasu and Honkawa rivers, the size of a campus. The Genbaku Dome, the former Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall, is left exactly as the bomb left it. It survived because it was about 160 metres from the hypocentre: the explosion crushed it almost vertically, rather than sideways like everything else.
The museum (200 yen) is dense, sometimes harrowing. It was redone in 2019: fewer objects, more individual stories. Shorter than before, but more piercing. The Children’s Monument, covered in chains of paper cranes, is dedicated to Sadako Sasaki, a little girl who was two when the bomb fell and died of leukaemia at twelve. If you have time for only one thing in Hiroshima, this is it.
One practical tip: if you want the experience in depth, rather than an automatic audioguide, find a local guide, ideally a descendant of hibakusha. The story isn’t comparable.
The Streetcars, Rolling Memory
Hiroshima runs the largest streetcar network in Japan, and it is no nostalgia ride: it is the true skeleton of the city’s transport, 180 yen a trip, more practical than any subway for reaching the Memorial Park or Yokogawa. The detail that gives you a shiver: the Hiroden company still keeps in regular service two cars that survived August 6, 1945, the hibaku densha 651 and 652. Crossing paths with one of them at a junction, repainted and full of high schoolers, says more about this city than many monuments.
Mitaki-dera, The Temple Everyone Misses
If you steal only one address from this page, take this one. Twenty minutes from the center (Kabe line to Mitaki, then a fifteen-minute walk), Mitaki-dera climbs its mountainside between three waterfalls, maples, hundreds of mossy jizō and a vermilion pagoda that seems to have been grown by the forest. Founded in 809, the temple quietly became a place of remembrance after the war: its pagoda was dismantled and brought from Wakayama in 1951 to console the souls of the bomb’s victims. In November the maples make it probably the best momiji spot in the city; the rest of the year, you will be more or less alone with the dragonflies.
The Castle And Shukkei-en, The Hiroshima Of Before
People forget Hiroshima was once a great castle town. The Carp Castle, founded in 1589 by Mōri Terumoto, reigns over its moat north of the center; the current keep is a 1958 reconstruction, and inside, a samurai history museum more interesting than expected. The real charm is in the grounds: the original foundations, the Gokoku shrine, and the eucalyptus and willow trees that survived the bomb, duly labeled.
Ten minutes away on foot, Shukkei-en (“the garden of condensed sceneries”) has been miniaturizing lakes, bridges and hills around a carp pond since 1620. Flattened in 1945, patiently replanted, it is now the favorite lunch spot of the district’s office workers. Take a tea in the house by the pond and watch the turtles negotiate their place on the rocks: this is peaceful Hiroshima, 800 meters from the hypocenter.
Itsukushima, The Floating Torii (And The Real Miyajima)
The great red torii planted in the water at Itsukushima is probably the most-reproduced postcard in Japan. And yet, arriving in mid-afternoon, you hesitate: low tide turns it into a land monument surrounded by tourists, and high tide into an expected photograph. The secret is to sleep on the island. Around 5 PM, ferries stop unloading their cargo, vendors close, and the island goes back to what it has always been, a Shinto sanctuary set on the sea, with sika deer wandering as if they were the real residents.
The current torii was completed in 2022, after six years of restoration. It’s the eighth version since the 12th century. The wood, camphor (kusunoki), is chosen to resist salt water, but has to be replaced roughly once a century. During the renovation, the iconic view simply didn’t exist: a massive scaffolding wrapped it. A few travellers, unaware, made the trip to see a torii under a tarp.
Beyond the torii, climb Mt Misen (535 m, cable car or a 90-minute hike). At the top, you’re alone, or nearly. The view of the Setouchi islands strung out to the horizon easily beats the photograph below.
Hiroshima Okonomiyaki: Stacked, Not Mixed
Hiroshima has its own version of okonomiyaki, and it is absolutely not to be confused with Osaka’s. In Osaka, you mix all the ingredients into the batter, then cook it. In Hiroshima, you stack, a thin crêpe, then a mountain of shredded cabbage, then pork, then (the signature move) a layer of yakisoba noodles, then an egg, then the whole thing flipped onto the hot plate. The result is three centimetres thick, and you eat it straight from the teppan with a small metal spatula.
The obvious tourist address is Okonomimura, a whole four-storey building stacked with about thirty stalls. Fun and crowded. For something more local, I like Mitchan Sōhonten (the historic restaurant, since 1950, near Hatchobori station) or Nagata-ya, right next to the Memorial Park, which serves exactly as it should without trading on nostalgia.
Yokogawa And Hondori, The City That Lives
In the evening everyone converges on Hondori, the big covered arcade, and the adjacent streets of Nagarekawa, the izakaya and bar district, dense and good-natured. It is perfectly fine, and it is not where I am taking you. Cross the river to Yokogawa instead: a neighborhood left in its own juice, independent cafés set up in old shopfronts, record stores, the Yokogawa cinema that has been screening for over a century, and counters where the owner refills your glass without asking. This is the locals’ Hiroshima, the one on no circuit, and it is one streetcar stop from the center.
Ogonzan, The View Nobody Does
Hiroshima is built on a delta of six rivers, and the best place to understand it is Mount Ogonzan, the wooded hill southeast of the center. From the top (by taxi, by car, or a 40-minute climb), the city fans out in a sheet of light between its arms of water and the bay. On game nights you can even see the Mazda Stadium glow red. It is the panorama local couples keep to themselves; I have never understood why the guidebooks skip it, and I am not going to complain.
The Mazda Museum, A Rotary Pilgrimage
Since this city invented the only commercially durable application of the rotary engine, you might as well watch it spin: the Mazda Museum, inside the maker’s immense headquarters east of the city, can only be visited on reservation (free, English tours). You walk through the brand’s history, the Cosmo Sport, the 1991 Le Mans win, and above all a stretch of the real assembly line at work. Even without an engine-shaped brain, watching cars being born is strangely hypnotic.
Setouchi, A Ferry Away
What most guides forget is that Hiroshima is the best entry point to real Setouchi. The prefecture stretches across a necklace of islands, small ports, coastal villages, and ferries leaving all day. Three days on the ground means three possible excursions:
👉 Onomichi, the Little Kyoto of Setouchi, an hour by train from Hiroshima. A maze of alleyways climbing a hillside, twenty-five temples, cats everywhere, and the starting point of the Shimanami Kaidō, the cycling route-bridge that links Honshu to Shikoku by hopping island to island over 70 kilometres. Do it by bike if you have time, by car otherwise.
👉 Takehara, staggering between whisky and sake, a museum-town of Edo-period merchant houses, where parts of the landscape that inspired the anime Tamayura were filmed. The historic distiller Nikka has a site here as a tribute to Masataka Taketsuru, the father of Japanese whisky, who was born here.
👉 Ōkunoshima, the rabbit island (and the other story we tell less often), the most Instagrammable island in Japan, covered in roaming rabbits. What’s mentioned less is that it housed a secret poison-gas factory until 1945, erased from official maps at the time. The rabbits are said to descend from the laboratory animals freed at the end of the war. The legend isn’t certain, but the factory was.
(I keep my favourite ferries and neighbourhood addresses saved on Ikuzo, useful when you want to chain these excursions without redoing the plan every morning.)
👉 Tomonoura, the Ponyo coast, 1h30 east: the little Edo-period port that inspired Miyazaki, and twenty minutes down the road, the vermilion pavilion of Abuto Kannon clinging to its cliff above the Inland Sea. The two together make one of the region’s finest half-days.
And if these excursions leave you wanting more, my 10-day Seto Inland Sea itinerary starts exactly here.
For Foreigners, For Japanese
Foreign travellers come to Hiroshima for the memorial, Itsukushima, and an okonomiyaki, in that order. Efficient over two days, but it feels like a mandatory route. Japanese travellers come for something else: a Carp game at the Mazda Stadium (the atmosphere is louder than Tokyo Dome), oysters in winter (November to February, and that’s the gastronomic reason), a day trip to Iwakuni’s Kintaikyō bridge with its five wooden arches, or just a weekend on Miyajima to disconnect without taking a plane. If you want to really see Hiroshima, take their programme instead.
Lesser-Known Facts
- The Wankel rotary engine was developed and perfected at Mazda in Hiroshima in the 1960s. The brand is today the only one in the world that has kept it commercially viable.
- Hayao Miyazaki took inspiration from Tomonoura (1h30 from Hiroshima by train + bus) for the setting of Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea. He stayed there in 2005, in a house overlooking the port that you can still visit.
- The hassaku, the round tangy citrus you find everywhere in Japan, is native to Innoshima, one of the Setouchi islands opposite Onomichi. It was identified in a temple garden in 1860.
- The first world conference on the medical effects of radiation was held in Hiroshima in 1956, organised by the WHO.
- Every 6 August, thousands of floating lanterns are set on the Motoyasu river at dusk. It’s not a tourist show: it’s a Buddhist rite of intercession for the dead. Watching without photographing is probably the right call.
- The Carp club is the only one in Nippon Professional Baseball that long belonged to its fans rather than to an industrial conglomerate. The official colour is red, “like the city’s determination to rise back up”.
When To Go, How To Get There
From Tokyo: Nozomi Shinkansen, about 4 hours, ¥19,000. From Kyoto or Osaka: 1h30 to 2h. Hiroshima airport is awkwardly placed (50 km east), the shinkansen remains the simplest option.
When: April for the sakura in the Memorial Park (strangely beautiful and emotionally loaded), November for momiji on Miyajima, and winter (December to February) for the oysters. 6 August, the date of the bomb, the city is packed with officials, journalists, pilgrims; avoid it unless that’s specifically why you’re going, prioritise it if it is.
How long: three days minimum. One for the Memorial Park unhurried, one for Miyajima sleeping on the island, one for an excursion to Onomichi, Takehara, or Ōkunoshima. With two days, you pick. With one, you haven’t seen anything, you’ve just ticked Hiroshima.
What Hiroshima Says, Without Saying It
There are few cities in the world whose name you know before you know the country. Hiroshima is one of them, and that’s a strange weight for its 1.2 million inhabitants to carry. What strikes you, if you stay a bit, is that the city does neither denial nor theatre. The Memorial is there, to be crossed, but on the way out you grab an okonomiyaki, head to a baseball game, take a ferry. Life continues, without apology, and that’s perhaps the real statement: look, we’re here, we eat, we laugh, we build, we remember. The rest writes itself around that.