Page 5 - RCI EV Asia October 2015

ready, set,
JAPAN
Peace Project
go
Hiroshima war museum more popular than ever.
The Atomic Dome,
ex Hiroshima Industrial Promotion Hall
Seven decades after the devastation
of an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima, the site remains one of the most popular tourist attractions in the country. Recently it appears to be getting more popular. According to local media, visits to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum by foreign tourists hit a record high of 234,360 in 2014. That’s more than a 100% increase from just three years ago.
Visitors come to bear witness to preserved burnt wreckage, painful survivor testimonies and human shadows left permanently visible after the atomic bomb explosion’s incandescent destruction. Some describe Hiroshima as a gripping, educational and emotional example
of “dark tourism,” “grief tourism”
or “battlefield tourism,” similar to Nazi concentration camps in Europe,
Cambodia’s torture prison and killing fields, West African slave ports, as well as the Nagasaki Peace Park and Atomic Bomb Museum.
The latter site memorializes the events and devastation surrounding the second atomic bomb dropped on that Japanese city three days after the Hiroshima bombing.
The Hiroshima Atomic Bomb Dome (also known as Genbaku Dome) was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1996. The iconic structure, designed in 1915 by a Czech architect, was the city’s Industrial Promotion Hall. When the United States dropped the bomb on August 6, 1945, it exploded just above the building, but didn’t totally destroy it because the immediate blast and heat buffered the air at ground zero.
35 new ‘peace projects’ planned for 2015
In addition to the Peace Memorial Museum, Hiroshima officials are actively promoting the city’s peace-centric identity. Hiroshima Mayor Kazumi Matsui has designated 2015 as a time to “share Hiroshima’s desire for peace,” launching a series of 35 projects to be completed in the coming months.
The projects, estimated to cost roughly
107 million yen (about $1.2million), focus on preserving the memories of the bomb’s survivors and enhancing the city’s ability to attract and accommodate tourists.
In honor of this month’s 70th anniversary, the mayor has allocated funding to create and improve smartphone applications that supply information about peace tourism.
ENDLESS VACATION 3