When most North Americans hear the name “Hiroshima,” they think of one obvious fact about the city: that at 8:15 on the morning of Aug. 6, 1945, a massive atomic bomb dropped by an American bomber detonated over homes and schools and businesses. The destruction was devastating, and hundreds of thousands of people perished.
On the first of my two visits here, I expected mainly sadness and woe. A place where people still mourned the past on a daily basis, where the legacy of death was inescapable despite the intervening years.
