Hiroshima Peace Memorial (Atomic Bomb Dome)

The Atomic Bomb Dome is the shell of a building that stayed standing in the area the bomb flattened. Its original name was the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall. At 8:15 in the morning on 6 August 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, the first city ever targeted with a nuclear weapon, three days before Nagasaki and nine days before Japan surrendered. The ruin is now a memorial to the more than 140,000 people killed in the bombing, kept permanently as it was left, neither repaired nor cleared, as a reminder of what nuclear weapons do. UNESCO listed it as a World Heritage Site in 1996.

The Dome stands at the edge of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, laid out around it between 1950 and 1964 on open ground the explosion had created. Before the bomb this was the Nakajima district, the busiest commercial and residential quarter of the city. The architect Kenzō Tange designed the park, and it now holds memorials, monuments, lecture halls and the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, which opened here in 1955. More than a million people come each year. Every 6 August the city holds its Peace Memorial Ceremony here, and from 3 to 5 May the Hiroshima Flower Festival fills the park and Peace Boulevard.

This is a place of mourning first and a sight second, and it is worth behaving like it. The ruin is kept exactly as it was left, and you see it from the paths of the park around it. Keep your voice low, keep phone calls for later, and photograph the building rather than posing in front of it. The museum is the hardest part of the visit and deserves an unhurried morning, so do not squeeze it between a train and a lunch booking, and leave some quiet time for the park afterwards. If you come on 6 August you are arriving on the anniversary: expect crowds, and treat the people around you as mourners, not an audience.

The Dome is in the centre of Hiroshima, and the city is one of the easy day trips from Osaka; the Hiroshima page covers the train. Once you arrive, a Suica or Pasmo IC card pays for local trains and buses. Give the museum the morning, while you have the most attention to give, and walk the park to the Dome after it. With a night to spare, Itsukushima, the shrine island better known as Miyajima, lies in Hiroshima Bay and deserves its own day rather than a rushed afternoon. Goodbars sells a Japan eSIM you install at home and switch on when you land; it runs on NTT docomo, Japan's largest mobile network by mobile contracts, and our Japan coverage page shows where it reaches and what independent speed tests measure.