Hiroshima

Hiroshima is the largest city in the Chūgoku region of western Honshu, the largest island of Japan. It gained city status on April 1, 1889.

The city's name means "Wide Island" in Japanese.

Hiroshima is best known as the first city in history to be targeted by a nuclear weapon when the United States Army Air Forces dropped an atomic bomb on the city at 8:16 a.m. on August 6, 1945, near the end of the Second World War.

The mushroom cloud over Hiroshima after the dropping of Little Boy

The Hiroshima atom bomb explosion was generated by matter weighing no more than a paper clip.

Tsutomu Yamaguchi was in Hiroshima for work when the first atom bomb hit, made it home to Nagasaki for the second, and lived to be 93.

There were 343,000 inhabitants of Hiroshima on the day the first atom bomb was dropped in 1945, killing 80,000.

Atomic Bomb Dome by Jan Letzel and modern Hiroshima. By Hirotsugu Mori - Wikipedia Commons

The Japanese command didn't realize Hiroshima had been totally destroyed until almost a whole day after it happened. Vague reports of some sort of large explosion had begun to filter in, but the Japanese high command knew that no large-scale air raid had taken place over the city.

Tens of thousands died in subsequent years from burns and radiation poisoning. The final death toll of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima was 200,000.

Three days after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, trams resumed their routes in the ruins of the city.

In early September 1945 Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett defied US restrictions and snuck into Hiroshima by train. Burchett was the first to tell the world about the effects of radiation on the victims of the bombing,. His Morse code dispatch was printed on the front page of the Daily Express newspaper in London on September 5, 1945. It was entitled "The Atomic Plague", with the subtitle "I Write This as a Warning to the World".

A typhoon hit Hiroshima a month after it was bombed that killed an additional 2,000 people.

Hiroshima was rebuilt after the war, with help from the national government through the Hiroshima Peace Memorial City Construction Law passed in 1949.

Kiyoshi Tanimoto was a Japanese minister and atomic bomb survivor from Hiroshima. In 1955, Tanimoto was invited to appear on the American television show This Is Your Life, which it featured surprise guests from the lives of its subjects. On the show broadcast on May 11, 1955, Tanimoto was reunited with Robert Lewis, the co-pilot of the Enola Gay.

The meeting between Tanimoto and Lewis was emotional and controversial. Tanimoto expressed his forgiveness for Lewis, but he also spoke about the devastation that the bomb had caused. Lewis said that he was sorry for the suffering that the bomb had caused, but he also said that he believed that it had been necessary to end the war.

The Hiroshima Peace Flame has burned continuously since it was lit on August 1, 1964. It is a symbol of the city's commitment to peace and will remain lit until all nuclear bombs on the planet are destroyed and the Earth is free from the threat of nuclear annihilation. The flame is located in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, near the Atomic Bomb Dome. 

The oleander is the official flower of the city of Hiroshima because it was the first to bloom again after the explosion of the atomic bomb.