Fukuromachi Elementary School Peace Museum, Peace museum in Fukuromachi, Hiroshima, Japan.
The Fukuromachi Elementary School Peace Museum preserves sections of a former school building, including a basement area and walls darkened by intense heat from the atomic explosion. The structure itself displays the direct physical impact of the detonation on the building.
The school building stood roughly 460 meters from the center of the atomic blast on August 6, 1945, suffering severe damage in the explosion. Many students and teachers died in this single event.
Survivors left messages on the school's blackened walls as a way to find missing family members after the bombing. These personal inscriptions reveal how people reconnected with one another during the chaos that followed.
The museum is walkable and located near several streetcar lines that serve the area. The exhibition spaces are quite compact, so a visit takes relatively little time to complete.
The basement of the former school was quickly converted into an emergency medical station right after the explosion, where injured people received emergency care. This space reveals how survivors rapidly organized makeshift relief efforts.
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