Monument To Peace (Genbaku Dome)

At 8:15 in the morning of August 6, 1945, the world’s first atomic bomb was launched by the United States military on the city of Hiroshima. The bomb exploded 600 meter above the city, scorching everything within a 2-kilometer radius and claiming over 200,000 lives. Due to its location a mere 160 meters away from the epicenter of the explosion, the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall received the full impact of the blast from directly overhead. However, the main portion of the building miraculously escaped total destruction. Now known as the Genbaku Dome in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, the remains of the building have been inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage List.

            The Industrial Promotion Hall was built in 1915 as the Hiroshima Prefectural Products Exhibition Hall. During World War II, it was used as a satellite office for Japan’s government  administrative agencies. The personnel who were in the building at the time of the explosion are thought to have been killed instantly. At some point after the war, local residents began calling the building the Genbaku Dome.

            As the world’s first city to suffer an atomic bombing, Hiroshima City has issued a number of peace declarations since the end of the war that appeal for lasting peace. As a result of a campaign the city carried out to have the Dome added to the World Heritage List, the site was inscribed in December 1996 as World Cultural Heritage. It was accepted under the criterion that it “ be directly or tangibly associated with events or living traditions, with ideas, or with beliefs or outstanding universal significance”.

            “When I first saw the Genbaku Dome, I was amazed by the fact that the damage from the precise moment of the atomic blast had been completely preserved as a monument,” say Narayanan Ganesan, an associate professor at the Hiroshima Peace Institute from Singapore who is conducting research on Southeast Asian politics and international relations, describing his first impression of the Dome. “It is a special example of World Heritage in that it is not simply a purely cultural manument, as in the case of Indonesia’s Borobudur Temple ruins or Cambodia’s Angkor Wat; it is also a testimony to the negative side of humanity. In the World Heritage Committee’s deliberations, there were countries such as the United States and China that opposed the inscription of the site. However, I think that the international community understands that Japan nominated the Genbaku Dome as World Heritage not to justify its actions in the war but to have it serve as a symbol of hope for peace.

            Along with Poland’s Auschwitz Concentration Camp, which was registered as World Heritage in 1917, the Genbaku Dome represents humanity’s “negative heritage” while also serving as a monument that, it is hoped, will prevent the folly of war from being repeated again. Today, 60 years after the end of the war, we are seeing rich greenery growing in abundance on the very spots in Hiroshima where people thought vegetation would not grow for 70 years. It is important that we keep the significance of the Genbaku Dome as World Heritage in our hearts forever.