Climate
| Climate | Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec |
| Daily highs °C | 10 | 11 | 14 | 20 | 25 | 28 | 31 | 33 | 30 | 24 | 18 | 12 |
| Nightly lows °C | 2 | 2 | 5 | 10 | 15 | 20 | 24 | 25 | 21 | 15 | 9 | 4 |
| Precipitation mm | 47 | 67 | 121 | 156 | 157 | 258 | 236 | 126 | 180 | 95 | 68 | 35 |
| Source: Japan Meteorological Agency (http://www.jma.go.jp/jma/...). |
Unfortunately, most travelers experience Hiroshima during the worst weather of the year, in July and August, when days of heavy rain give way to brutal, muggy heat. Don't book accommodations without air conditioning if that's when you're planning to visit. Also note that in the latter half of September, warm and pleasant days are interspersed with typhoons powerful enough to wreck buildings such as the one that nearly destroyed Itsukushima Shrine on Miyajima in 2004 and keep travelers locked up in their hotels.
October and November are ideal, with less rain and cool, refreshing temperatures. The winter months are fine for a visit — the weather is dry, with very little rain or snow, and the temperatures are rarely cold enough to keep you indoors. As elsewhere in Japan, though, a number of museums are closed from 29 Dec to 1 Jan or 3 Jan.
April and May also have excellent weather. The cherry blossoms come out in early April, and the parks around Hiroshima Castle turn into a mob scene with hanami parties. For sakura with a bit more solitude, go for a hike on Ushita-yama, overlooking the north exit of JR Hiroshima Station see Recreation.
Literature
Eleanor Coerr's Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes tells the true story of Sadako Sasaki, a young bomb victim who was inspired to fold cranes by a Japanese folk tale, which said that anyone who folds over a thousand cranes will have their wish come true. According to some versions of the story, Sadako completed more than a thousand before she died of leukemia at the age of twelve; in Coerr's book, she finished about 640 before died, and her schoolmates completed the rest in her memory.
John Hersey's Hiroshima is a short but gripping book that describes the experiences of six people — five Japanese citizens and a German priest — before and after the blast. It was originally published as an issue-length article in The New Yorker in August 1946. Almost forty years later, Hersey returned to Hiroshima to write a follow-up article, which continues the survivors' stories in the post-war years, and it is included in new editions of the book.
Masuji Ibuse's Black Rain is a novel about the post-war experiences of a family of hibakusha as they face discrimination in post-war Japanese society for both employment and marriage, and cope with health problems from radiation poisoning, the consequences of which were barely understood by doctors of the time.
Keiji Nakazawa's Barefoot Gen is the most popular manga treatment of the atomic bomb story, based loosely on Nakazawa's own experience as a young boy in the days immediately after the blast.
Many Japanese people also associate Hiroshima with the yakuza, thanks to the classic 1971 Bunta Sugawara / Kinji Fukasaku gangster film Battles Without Honor and Humanity also known as The Yakuza Papers and its four sequels, which were set in the city.
Orientation
Most visitors arrive at JR Hiroshima Station, which is a 25 minute walk from the Peace Park. If you arrive by Shinkansen, you will be at the north side of the station. There is an underground pedestrian walkway leading to the main side of the station south exit, where all other trains arrive. Take the pedway and head upstairs; you will see the taxis, trams, and buses that lead to the city center. If you continue on the underground walkway, you'll reach an escalator that exits by a major bridge, with the station now behind you; you can walk to the Peace Park from there, branching right on Aioi-dori.
There is a tourist information office on the first floor of the south side of the station, and another on the second floor of the north side. Both are open 9:30AM-5PM daily.
Other visitors may arrive at the Hiroshima Bus Center åºå³¶ãã¹ã»ã³ã¿ã¼ (http://www.h-buscenter.com) on the third floor of the SOGO department store, which is just down the street from the Peace Park. Coin lockers are available at both the Hiroshima Bus Center and JR Hiroshima Station.
Generally speaking, addresses in Minami-ku Minami Ward are in the station area, while Naka-ku Naka Ward covers the Peace Park and its surroundings.
Money
There is an international ATM in the lobby of the central post office, which is on your right as you exit the south side of JR Hiroshima Station. English menus should be available. International ATMs with English menus are also available at 7-Eleven convenience stores (http://www.sevenbank.co.j...), which are open 24 hours in plentiful quantities throughout the city.
If you need to change money, the bank across the street from the station — on the first floor of the Fukuya department store — can handle transactions to and from most major currencies.
Understand
Those expecting to step off the Shinkansen into a pile of smoldering rubble will be in for a surprise, as Hiroshima has all the ferroconcrete and blinking neon of any other modern Japanese city. Teenagers stream in and out of the station, where McDonald's and the latest keitai mobile phones await; hapless salarymen rush down Aioi-dori to their next meeting, casting a bloodshot eye toward the seedy bars of Nagarekawa as they pass. At first glance, it can be hard to imagine that anything out of the ordinary ever happened here.
Hiroshima was founded in 1589 on the delta formed by the Ota River, flowing out to the Seto Inland Sea. The warlord Mori Terumoto built a castle there, only to lose it eleven years later to Tokugawa Ieyasu after the Battle of Sekigahara, which marked the beginning of the Tokugawa shogunate. Control of the area was given to the Asano clan of samurai, who ruled without much incident for the next two and a half centuries. Their descendants embraced the rapid modernization of the Meiji period, and Hiroshima became the seat of government for the region, a major industrial center, and a busy port.
By World War II, Hiroshima was one of the larger cities in Japan, and a natural communications and supply center for the military. Forced laborers from Korea and China were shipped in by the tens of thousands, and local schoolchildren also spent part of their days working in munitions factories. Residents of the city must have felt curiously blessed for the first few years of the war, as Hiroshima had been left largely untouched by American bombing campaigns; that was, however, intended to ensure a more accurate measurement of the atomic bomb's effect on the candidate cities, which had been narrowed down to Hiroshima, Kokura, Kyoto, Nagasaki, and Niigata.
On 6 August 1945 at 8:15AM the American B-29 bomber Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb dubbed "Little Boy" on Hiroshima. It is estimated that at least 70,000 people were killed in the explosion and its immediate aftermath. Most of the city was built of wood, and fires raged out of control across nearly five square miles, leaving behind a charred plain with a few scattered concrete structures. Corpses lay piled in rivers; medical treatment was virtually non-existent, as most of the city's medical facilities had been located near the hypocenter, and the few doctors left standing had no idea what hit them. That evening, radioactive materials in the atmosphere caused a poisonous "black rain" to fall.
In the days ahead, many survivors began to come down with strange illnesses, such as skin lesions, hair loss, and fatigue. Between 70,000 and 140,000 people would eventually die from radiation-related diseases. Known as hibakusha, the survivors were also subject to severe discrimination from other Japanese, but have since been at the forefront of Japan's post-war pacifism and its campaign against the use of nuclear weapons.
Recovery was slow, given the scale of the devastation, and black markets thrived in the first few years after the war. However, the reconstruction of Hiroshima became a symbol of Japan's post-war pacifism. While most of the city is thoroughly modernized, there are areas — such as the ramshackle buildings east of the train station slated for demolition over the next few years — that still reflect that 1950s rush to rebuild.
Today, Hiroshima has a population of more than 1.1 million. Automobiles are a major local industry, with Mazda's corporate headquarters nearby. There are three excellent art museums in the city center, some of Japan's most fanatical sports fans, and a wide range of culinary delights — most notably the city's towering contribution to bar cuisine, Hiroshima-style okonomiyaki.
Although many visitors, especially Americans, may feel apprehensive about visiting Hiroshima, it is a friendly, welcoming city, with as much interest in Western culture as anywhere else in Japan. Tourists are welcomed, and exhibits related to the atomic bomb are not concerned with blame or accusations. Bear in mind, though, that many hibakusha still live in the city, and even most of the young people in Hiroshima have family members who lived through the blast. As such, the average Hiroshima resident isn't likely to relish talking about it, although you needn't shy away from the topic if one of the chatty fellows around the Peace Park brings it up.