News

by Kyosuke Mizukawa, Senior Staff Writer

In June 1972, a restoration map of the former Nakajima district was placed in the lobby of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, overlooking Hiroshima City’s Peace Memorial Park. The map, engraved on copper plates measuring four meters in length by meters in width, shows houses, shops, temples, public bathhouses, and movie theaters in the areas of Nakajima-honmachi, Zaimoku-cho, Tenjin-machi, and Motoyanagi-machi, which are situated in what is now Peace Park. The map also includes the name for each household and each of the shops located in those areas.

Former residents watched on at map’s installation

The map was created by a group called the Hiroshima Peace Park Hypocenter Restoration Committee, composed of former residents. Tomoyuki Kawasaki, secretary-general of the committee who passed away in 1985 at the age of 66, held Buddhist prayer beads in his hands and watched on with other members of the group at the time of the map’s installation. In a later interview, he explained, “This record of reconstruction was created to widely convey the indiscriminate and brutal nature of the atomic bombing as well as to call for peace.”

In 1931, as he entered his teenage years, Mr. Kawasaki began to live and work at Kuramoto Shokai, an electrical appliance store located in the area of Nakajima-honmachi. The store was located on Nakajima Hondori shopping street, a busy shopping area in the area. According to the Record of the Hiroshima A-bomb War Disaster, published in 1971, 4,370 people in 1,330 households were estimated to have been residing in the four neighborhoods and in areas located on their south side before the atomic bombing.

On August 6, 1945, the Nakajima-honmachi district, located near the hypocenter, was annihilated in the atomic bombing carried out by the U.S. military. Although Eizo Nomura, who passed away at the age of 82, miraculously survived the bombing because he had been in the basement of the Fuel Hall (present-day Rest House), “approximately 100%” of those in the district “died instantly,” according to the previously mentioned record of the disaster.

Mr. Kawasaki had been drafted by the military and was serving in Kyushu at the time the atomic bomb was dropped, returning to enter Hiroshima City for military duty two days later. After being demobilized from the military, he managed an electrical appliance store in the Danbara district (in Hiroshima’s present-day Minami Ward), but his emotional attachment to Nakajima-honmachi never faded. In 1956, he and other former residents erected the Peace Kannon statue, a Buddhist monument to peace, situated in a corner of Peace Memorial Park. The words inscribed on the base of the statue read, “Here stands the former site of Nakajima-honmachi.”

Mr. Kawasaki proceeded to make a list of former residents of the area who had been killed in the atomic bombing. His second son, Yosuke, 74, a resident of Hiroshima’s Minami Ward, said, “He did so probably because he recalled the faces of his neighbors and customers who had died in the atomic bombing.” Searching for those who survived because of their evacuation from the area, he set about gathering information. In that way, he began creating a map of the area before the bombing.

Project gains momentum

The effort to create a restoration map of the hypocenter area grew in the late 1960s when Hiroshima University and the Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK) began a survey to recreate the hypocenter area in cooperation with citizens. The survey aimed to recreate the destroyed neighborhoods within a 500-meter radius of the hypocenter, including Nakajima-honmachi, with the name of each household in an attempt to elucidate the scale and scope of the devastation. Former residents of all of the neighborhoods gathered and shared their memories, illustrating on paper the layout of houses and shops.

It was in 1968 that the Hypocenter Restoration Committee was formed at the behest of former residents of the four neighborhoods. The committee planned to create a copper-plate map to convey to park visitors an image of the hypocenter area before the bombing and the tragedy resulting from the bombing and, for that, it sought cooperation from the Hiroshima City government. With subsidies from the city as well as donations, the map, created on the basis of information on a total of around 700 households that had been obtained from the survey, was unveiled in July 1972.

Mr. Kawasaki said, “I hope the restoration map can help pass on the A-bombing experience to children.” His son Yosuke currently serves as vice chair of the Nakajima-honmachi Peace Kannon Association, a group composed of former residents and bereaved family members. The association holds a memorial service on August 6 each year in front of the Peace Kannon statue. Standing next to the statute is a monument inscribed with the names of the 438 victims from the Nakajima-honmachi area.

The survey to create the map of the area before the atomic bombing was expanded to include the area within two kilometers of the hypocenter when the city government began allocating a budget for such work starting in fiscal 1969. When the map on copper plates of the Nakajima-honmachi area was produced, there was insufficient information about certain parts of the district. The news media continue their investigations in pursuit of the reality of the devastation.

(Originally published on April 19, 2025)