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Few cities carry the weight of the twentieth century quite like Hiroshima. Rebuilt almost entirely from rubble after August 1945, it has grown into a modern, forward-looking city of roughly 1.2 million people on the Ota River delta in Japan's Chugoku region, yet its relationship with that single day in its history remains the defining fact of any visit. The Peace Memorial Park, a UNESCO World Heritage site, occupies the land closest to the hypocentre of the atomic bomb and contains the Genbaku Dome, the skeletal ruin of the former Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall, left deliberately unrestored as a permanent witness. The adjacent Peace Memorial Museum draws visitors from across the world and asks something of everyone who walks through it. To come to Hiroshima only for the history would be to misread the city, but to come without engaging with it would be to miss the point entirely.

The city spreads across six islands formed by the Ota River's channels before they reach Hiroshima Bay, and this geography gives it an unusually open, low-rise feel compared with Osaka or Tokyo. The central Naka ward holds most of what first-time visitors gravitate towards: the Peace Park and its surroundings, the covered shopping arcade of Hondori, and the castle, a 1958 reconstruction of the original sixteenth-century fortress whose keep offers a clear view across the delta. Trams, a rarity in modern Japanese cities, still run through the centre on lines that have operated since 1912, and they remain one of the most practical ways to move between the main sights.