On August 6, 1945, an American B-29 bomber called the Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb called “Little Boy” on the city of Hiroshima, Japan. The impact killed an estimated 70,000 to 80,000 people instantly and sent a shockwave rippling over the city, followed by a firestorm that devoured the city and killed thousands more.

On August 9, the United States dropped a second bomb on the city of Nagasaki, killing some 40,000 people. In total, the bombings are estimated to have resulted in the deaths of between 150,000 and 246,000 people. 

The bombs left unimaginable devastation in their wake. The blasts killed or injured some 90 percent of doctors and decimated half the cities’ hospitals, leaving most people to die of burns and injuries without substantial aid in the wake of the blast. 

In the decades since the event, effects from the bombs have continued to cause harm. Survivors have suffered from various kinds of cancers and experienced high rates of miscarriage and death.

Simultaneously, over the years, the city of Hiroshima has metamorphosed into a memorial city filled with commemorative monuments dedicated to world peace. People affected by the bombs are known as the hibakusha, and many of these people have devoted their lives to working toward a world without nuclear weapons and to sharing and preserving the stories of the devastation that happened on those August days. 

One of them was Sadako Sasaki, a young girl whose efforts to fold over 1,000 paper cranes sparked a global peace movement that persists to this day.

Paper Cranes

Sadako Sasaki was just two years old when the bomb fell on her home city of Hiroshima. She was not injured by the blast, but developed leukemia—a disease then known as the “A-bomb disease”—at age 10.

In Japanese folklore, there is a story that says cranes can live for a thousand years, and if a person folds a paper crane for each year of a crane’s life, their wish will be granted. While in the hospital, Sadako began folding cranes in hopes that she could wish to become well again. She made over 1,300 of them before she died on October 25, 1955. “She kept folding cranes not for herself but for our parents and family,” her brother, Masahiro Sasaki, wrote in a 2020 blog post.

After her death, her classmates formed a club in her honor and began raising money for a grave for Sadako, whose family was suffering financially. They were able to raise enough money from schools and countries around the world to build a statue in honor of children who had died because of the bombs. 

On May 5, 1958, the Children’s Peace Monument was unveiled in Hiroshima. The practice of folding cranes in support of children affected by the bombs and the abolition of nuclear weapons soon spread worldwide.

Today, children around the world still send paper cranes each year to be placed at the bottom of Sadako’s statue, and people who visit her statue in Hiroshima are invited to create cranes of their own.

“One compassionate heart can create small peace around you. Small peace can then [lead to] big peace in the end…” Masahiro wrote of the movement his sister started. “The paper crane is a symbol of peace. Peace is our wish!”

Ginkgo Trees

When the atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima, it destroyed almost every living thing and decimated thousands of buildings. Scientists estimate that during the explosion, ground temperatures rose to between 3,000 and 4,000 degrees Celsius, a heat capable of turning a human body to dust. 

Among the few living things to survive the blast were six Ginkgo bilbao trees. These trees are famously resilient, able to live over 3,000 years. As a species, they’ve been around for a very long time, with the oldest ginkgo fossils dating back some 290 million years. These trees have also been used medicinally in Asian cultures for millennia to treat various ailments involving memory, eyesight, blood flow, and more.

In Hiroshima, the bomb destroyed the trees’ leaves and stripped away their bark, but still, the trunks stood. The next spring, little green buds emerged from them. The trees quickly became international symbols of hope and resurrection. 

“Less than a year after the destruction, spring had pushed up a green shoot through the A-bomb desert—where rumor held that nothing would grow for 75 years,” Shinzo Hamai, the first mayor of Hiroshima after the bombing, said of the trees. “The powerful emotions stirred by a little sign of life would be hard for anyone [to understand] who is not a hibakusha or a Hiroshima resident. Our expressions brightened, our steps quickened, in response to more than the seasonal change.” 

The trees were soon named hibakujumoku, which means “bombed trees” but is sometimes translated as “survivor trees.” Though forever changed by radiation, the trees have continued to grow. Their seeds have also been collected and spread around the world by the organization Green Legacy Hiroshima. Today, descendants of these resilient trees grow in soil around the world, from California to Costa Rica. They are honored as symbols of peace wherever they grow.

Hideko Tamura Snider was 10 when the bomb fell on her home city of Hiroshima. In 2017, she planted 51 seeds descended from the six original hibakujumoku in Oregon. “I can’t grow my mother. I can’t grow my cousin,” she told The New York Times of what the act meant to her. “But the tree, I could.” 

The Flame of Peace

In Hiroshima, a flame will burn until the day no more nuclear weapons exist on Earth. That is the vision behind Hiroshima’s Flame of Peace, an eternal flame located in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park. 

It was designed by Kenzo Tange, a professor at the University of Tokyo at the time, and was first lit on August 1, 1964. The flame burns within a pedestal designed to evoke an image of two hands stretching towards the sky, symbolizing the people who searched for water in the wake of the disaster.

Each year, Hiroshima holds a Flame of Peace Relay, during which people from different communities run through Hiroshima in support of the abolition of nuclear weapons. In 1994, the Eternal Flame was used to light the torch of the Asian Games in Hiroshima City.

The Genbaku Dome

The Genbaku Dome was the only structure that still stood in the hypocenter where the atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima. Ever since then, it has stood as a stark, skeletal reminder of the devastation wrought by the bomb.

Today, it is known as the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. The structure stands on the banks of the Motoyasu River, and was once part of the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotional Hall. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of the most recognizable structures associated with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the efforts to prevent such a thing from happening again.

As the city of Hiroshima was being rebuilt, many residents felt that the structure should be removed because of the painful memories it evoked. However, the Hiroshima Paper Crane Association protested its destruction, and ultimately, it was designated as a memorial and a warning against nuclear weapons.

The Hiroshima Peace Bell

The Hiroshima Peace Bell was made by bell-caster Masahiko Katori and was completed on September 20, 1964. One side is emblazoned with an image of the world map free from borders, which symbolizes a world of interconnectedness and unity. The other side holds a mirror, meant to “reflect the heart of the person who rings the bell,” according to the city of Hiroshima’s website. 

The bell rests beneath a metal structure and is surrounded by lotus blossoms, which are tributes to he lotus leaves that people used to reduce burn pain directly after the bombing. Visitors are invited to ring the bell while praying for nuclear disarmament and world peace.

“We wish that the sound of the bell resound in each corner of the world,” reads the website, “and reach the hearts of each and every human being.”