Eighty years after the atomic bombing, some Japanese think that peace for peace’s sake is no longer enough.
There is a Peace Boulevard, a Peace Bell and a Peace Memorial Park.
On a recent summer afternoon, at the Children’s Peace Monument, near the Flame of Peace, elementary school students in cotton hats and crisp uniforms folded origami cranes. They were honouring a little girl who had tried to overcome the effects of Little Boy, as the atomic bomb used in the world’s first nuclear attack was code-named, by folding 1000 paper birds, a Japanese tradition for good fortune. She died of radiation poisoning anyway.
Hiroshima was bombed by the US military on August 6, 1945, causing the deaths of about 140,000 residents by the end of the year and bringing to a close Japan’s imperial rampage across Asia and the world’s deadliest war.
Today, the Japanese city stands synonymous with peace. From the ashes of nuclear devastation, Hiroshima – with the city of Nagasaki, which was bombed three days later – was rebuilt and regenerated. Burned and sickened by radiation, many of Hiroshima’s survivors forgave. They wove pacifism into their DNA, the vanguards of a vanquished nation that cast off decades of imperialism.
Ever since 1949, when the Peace Memorial City Construction Law was enacted, Hiroshima has hosted conferences, concerts, musicals and mime performances, all in the name of peace. In 2024, a group representing Japanese atomic bomb survivors was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, to honour its campaign to eradicate nuclear weapons.
But 80 years after the world’s only nuclear attacks, Japan is not entirely at peace. Three of its closest neighbours possess nuclear weapons: China, Russia and North Korea. The world at large, from Ukraine to the Gaza Strip, is cleaved by conflict. In the Pacific, China is flexing its power, just as American influence seems to be waning. Time is running out, too. The last major arms control treaty between the US and Russia is set to lapse early next year.
Bound by an American-imposed constitution that renounces war and prevents it from having a military except for defensive purposes, Japan is fractured between those who defend pacifism as a national virtue and those who think the country must abandon its submissive stoop. Even the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize last year felt like an anachronism, a vestige of a time when a world without nuclear weapons could be imagined.
“We are now at a turning point,” said Noriyuki Kawano, the director of the Centre for Peace at Hiroshima University, referring to a growing feeling in Japan, particularly among young people, that peace for peace’s sake is no longer enough. “Hiroshima is Hiroshima, but if Japan is to face reality, Hiroshima may become isolated.”
The number of Japanese students who believe in nuclear deterrence – the notion that countries with nuclear weapons are less likely to wage war on each other – has increased in recent years, according to surveys by the Centre for Peace.
The phrase in Japanese used to explain why the country needs to rearm is “shoganai,” roughly translated as “it can’t be helped”. It can’t be helped that China is acting assertively in regional waters, claiming territory and flaunting a powerful navy. It can’t be helped that the US-Japan security partnership feels frayed, particularly as President Donald Trump has called upon Japan to shoulder more of its defence. It can’t be helped that memories of Hiroshima’s horrors are fading.
The survivors of the atomic bombings – August 6 at Hiroshima, and August 9 at Nagasaki – are now 80 years old or more. This anniversary will likely be the last major remembrance to include firsthand accounts of what splitting uranium and plutonium atoms wrought: flayed flesh, irradiated babies, maggot-infested burns and decades of radiation-induced disease.
Even as Hiroshima sells peace-branded mochi treats and hand towels, the nearby port town of Kure exists in counterpoise. Once home to the largest Imperial Navy base and arsenal, Kure is a beneficiary of Japan’s current military expansion. The country’s largest warship docks here, and a former steelyard is slated to become another naval facility. At a military history museum, origami cranes from Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Park are recycled into paper fans emblazoned with the Yamato, Japan’s “unsinkable” World War II battleship, which was eventually torpedoed by the Americans.
“People are realising that peace will not come just by praying,” said Masanari Tade, the son of a Hiroshima survivor who died at 50. Like many who suffered, Tade’s father refused official status as an atomic bomb victim because of the stigma attached to those subjected to radiation. Tade is now the Hiroshima head of Nippon Kaigi, an ultranationalist political bloc that wants to revise the constitutional clause banning a conventional military," he said.
The fallout
Eighty years ago, Chieko Kiriake was a high school student in Hiroshima, drafted to work in war factories, cleaning old guns and military uniforms.
On the hot and cloudless morning of August 6, Kiriake, dressed in a thick army canvas top hanging down to her knees, was cooling off under the eaves of a building, when a searing brightness exploded over Hiroshima at 8.15am. The city went dark.
By the time Kiriake pulled herself out of the wreckage, every landmark she knew in Hiroshima had disintegrated. For days, she tended to fellow students seared by the atomic explosion. One after another, they died. She sifted through their cremated remains, a Japanese ritual. The shards of one friend’s bones shone a soft pink, like early cherry blossoms.
“Back then, I was ashamed that my life was saved,” Kiriake said. “I thought, ‘How much easier it would have been if we died together.’”
On August 15, 1945, Emperor Hirohito went on the radio to announce Japan’s exit from the war. (The monarch later said he was not, in fact, divine, the kind of deity who could compel soldiers to die on his behalf.) He spoke in a courtly Japanese so removed from everyday speech that Kiriake and most civilians could barely understand him.
Like most hibakusha, as the atomic bomb survivors are known, Kiriake, now 95, is fervently pro-peace. Some victims hid their trauma and their keloids, the painful scar tissue from burns, for fear that their marriage or job prospects would be diminished. But Kiriake has spent years teaching subsequent generations about the consequences of war and nuclear attacks.
“Hiroshima now values peace above all else, and they say, ‘We must abolish nuclear weapons,’” she said. “But 80 years ago, it was a military capital until the atomic bomb was dropped.”
“Everyone was invaded by militarism,” she added.
Takashi Hiraoka, a former mayor of Hiroshima, is 97 and says he is angry that Japan has never signed the global Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. He reserves special ire for Fumio Kishida, the former Prime Minister, whose family is from Hiroshima. Kishida supported nuclear disarmament, but in 2022 he signed off on a plan to dramatically increase defence spending.
Japan, Hiraoka said, is “leaning to the right and becoming militaristic”.
Tade, of the ultranationalist bloc, thinks that Japan needs to move on from a war that ended 80 years ago – even as others condemn Japan for a lack of contrition for the atrocities committed by its Imperial Armed Forces.
Like other nationalists, some of whom have a growing voice in Japan’s ruling party, Tade dismisses documented war crimes by Japanese forces – from the Nanjing Massacre and the sexual enslavement of women as so-called “comfort women” to biological warfare experiments – as concocted by a Western-supported intelligentsia.
“It’s a Japanese guilt theory, that Japan started the war because it was bad and so it had to suffer damage,” he said. “There is a sad reality, a logic used to justify the bombing.”
In mid-June, Tade turned out in Hiroshima to see Emperor Naruhito of Japan, the pacifist grandson of the monarch in whose name the Imperial Japanese forces invaded and attacked.
The crowd of about 5000 people, among them an energetic core of nationalists, held paper lanterns and yelled “banzai,” the cheer still tainted by Japan’s military past. They looked up at the building where Naruhito and Empress Masako were staying. Suddenly, two glowing orbs appeared by the window, lanterns held by the emperor and empress to acknowledge their devotees below.
Defending a nation
To eradicate Japanese imperialism, the Americans oversaw the drafting of a constitution in which Japan forever renounces war. The United States promised to defend Japan if it came under attack; more than 50,000 American soldiers are still stationed in the country. The security treaty, which put Japan under the American nuclear umbrella, is a bedrock of the post-war Pacific order and has allowed Japan to promote peace. But the terms of the alliance are being questioned, by both Japanese and American politicians.
Japan’s military is called the Self-Defence Forces, its formation in 1954 hastened by an American wish for Japan to serve as a bulwark against Communism prompted by the Korean War. Last year, the Japanese parliament approved a 9.7% increase in the defence budget for this year, bringing Japan’s annual military outlays to about $57 billion, and on course to rank among the world’s top spenders.
The build-up has come to Kure, the port city neighbouring Hiroshima. This year, it was named the command centre for a maritime transport network serving Japan’s southern islands, including the approach to Taiwan and the South China Sea, two potential flash points with China. The 320-acre steel factory conversion is slated to include an ammunition depot.
Kure is now a pilgrimage site for military buffs. The museum honouring the Yamato, the World War II aircraft carrier, is undergoing a $33 million renovation. Naval spotters can view modern-day attack submarines, a stealth frigate that was commissioned in May, and Japan’s largest warship, the Kaga.
“There is a vast Pacific Ocean surrounding Japan,” said Captain Shusaku Takeuchi, the commanding officer of the Kaga, adding that “Japan has to defend the sea area around Japan”.
Lieutenant Yusuke Murakami serves on the Kaga, a helicopter carrier. He did not grow up playing soldier. His great-grandfather died at Iwo Jima, one of the most punishing battles in the Pacific, and he is from Hiroshima. But Murakami loves planes and helicopters, machines that soar like cranes and doves, birds of peace.
“Japan is a peaceful country,” he said. “War was a long time ago.”
The military expansion in Kure has angered some residents, who note that the city was bombed 14 times by the Americans during World War II.
“Revitalising the military industry would be strangling ourselves,” said Takashi Koretsune, a member of a citizens’ group.
The remembrance
Little Boy destroyed nearly 70% of buildings in Hiroshima. The hypocentre, the point below the midair detonation, is now a small parking lot for a medical clinic. Few tourists come to see the unassuming sign marking the spot.
Around the corner, one building miraculously survived: the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotional Hall, its dome stripped to its steel skeleton but its foundation largely unscathed.
A museum nearby tells of Hiroshima’s suffering. Tourists emerge hushed, parents gripping their children’s hands. Across the city, there are signs of a peace industrial complex, drawings of doves and “no nukes” bumper stickers and garlands of origami cranes.
The legacy of the bombing infuses the city’s art scene. Shinji Okoda, a hard-core punk rocker, headbangs to lyrics that push denuclearisation and condemn violence in Ukraine and Gaza.
“Punk rock has always been political in the West,” he said. “Being from Hiroshima, I felt like I should do my part.”
But there is elision in Hiroshima, too, a passive voice used in the official explanation of what transformed the city: The bomb was dropped. People often describe the nuclear attack as if it was a natural disaster devoid of human intervention. Only at the end of one exhibit is it made clear how the United States pursued atomic weapons and how the race against the Soviet Union may have hastened President Harry S. Truman’s decision to order the second bombing.
In 2016, President Barack Obama came to Hiroshima. He was the first sitting US president to visit, but he did not apologise for the attacks.
“On a bright, cloudless morning,” Obama said, “death fell from the sky.”
Hiraoka, the former mayor of Hiroshima, has campaigned for decades for denuclearisation. He wants no more war. Unlike some other Japanese politicians, he recognises Japan’s responsibility for its brutal wartime record. But he also says there is another nation that needs to face its history.
“We must hold America responsible,” he said. “In other words, the first step in eliminating nuclear weapons is making them acknowledge that America’s strategy of dropping bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was wrong.”
Isamu Nakakura, now 100, began his Imperial Navy training at 14 and became a draftsman at Kure, rendering tiny submersibles used at Pearl Harbour.
“We were taught that the Americans were red demons,” he said.
After the war, Nakakura worked with American researchers for 20 years, documenting the uptick in diseases associated with radiation, such as leukaemia and breast and lung cancers. While the initial blast of radiation dissipated quickly, victims of the blast suffered from illnesses that sometimes showed up decades later.
Once a designer of war machines, he now frets about the durability of Japan’s pacifism.
“There hasn’t been a very thorough discussion with people who bravely raise their hands for peace diplomacy,” he said. “Peace is not just the absence of war.”
The peace celebrated in Hiroshima suffers from other omissions. The Japanese Empire annexed the Korean Peninsula in 1910, dispossessing many. Landless Koreans laboured in Japan, including about 85,000 in Hiroshima who dug air raid shelters or collected wood for charcoal. Up to 30,000 Koreans died from the atomic bombing on August 6.
“The pain of moving and working here, and then the atomic bomb, this was a double hardship,” said Kwon Joon Oh, whose father survived the detonation but died of lung cancer at 47.
Kwon said that Japan’s Government for years did not provide official support to document the Korean dead. Nor, he said, have the awardees of the Nobel Peace Prize acknowledged the full extent of Korean suffering.
Submerging memories was what many Japanese families did for decades. Toshinori Tetsutani never met his brother, Shinichi, who died at age 3 from the blast, nor his two sisters, who were also killed. After Shinichi died, his parents couldn’t bear to give his body for mass burial. They secretly interred him in their garden, with a neighbourhood girl. Next to the children, they nestled a tricycle, Shinichi’s prized toy.
Forty years later, the parents, with their sons born after the war, dug into the ground. They found tiny skeletons holding hands, just as they had been placed. The tricycle was unearthed and donated to the Hiroshima peace museum. From inside Shinichi’s skull, covered in a helmet, the roots of a fig and a pomegranate tree grew. The boys born after the war had eaten fruit from those trees.
Yoshiko Konishi, Tetsutani’s daughter, now tells the tale of Shinichi to children like her own. Some schools in Hiroshima have stopped commemorating the anniversary of the bombing. Fewer survivors are alive to share their memories.
“It feels a little strange saying this in Hiroshima, but I worry that we might forget,” she said.
Kiriake, the 95-year-old survivor of the bombing, remembers how no one expected anything to grow again in Hiroshima’s scorched soil. But the next spring, seedlings pushed through the earth. Pink oleander flowers bloomed. Years later, Kiriake planted in her garden a cutting from an oleander tree growing near the point of the bomb’s greatest impact. It blossoms every year.
“I was happy that the plants grew,” she said of the sight of green in a charred city 80 years ago. “I thought, this will be fine, and I will be able to live.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Hannah Beech and Hisako Ueno
Photographs by: Chang W. Lee
©2025 THE NEW YORK TIMES