On a little island right in the middle of Hiroshima, you’ll find the Peace Park. This is exactly where the first atomic bomb, Little Boy, went off on August 6, 1945, at a height of 580 metres, reducing the city to rubble and ashes. The Atomic Bomb Dome, which used to be the Chamber of Commerce and Industry building, gives you an idea of the massive scale of the destruction. In the park, alongside a museum, there’s a cenotaph with the names of the bomb victims, plus a gas flame that will only be put out once there are no more nuclear bombs left in the world. A memorial remembers the story of little Sasaki Sadako. She survived the blast, but a year later she got leukaemia. There’s a custom here that says the gods will grant you a wish if you fold 1,000 paper cranes. Sadako folded the cranes, but eventually she still passed away from her illness. To this day, schoolchildren from all over Japan fold long, colourful chains of paper cranes as a symbol of peace, and they’re hung up here (and at a memorial in Nagasaki).

Since this question keeps coming up: these days, the radiation levels in Hiroshima are completely back to normal and are about the same as the natural background radiation in Germany. At the Atomic Bomb Dome, the radiation is currently sitting at 0.1 µSv/h. Just for comparison: in Cologne it’s 0.087 µSv/h, and in Oberasbach near Nuremberg it’s 0.14 µSv/h.