Hiroshima Castle: Rebuilt Twice, and the Trees That Survived

Hiroshima Castle stood about a kilometre from the hypocentre. The five-storey wooden keep, standing since the 1590s and designated a national treasure, was destroyed on 6 August 1945 — the blast collapsed it outright.

The keep you see today was rebuilt in 1958, in ferro-concrete, following the original exterior. Inside it is a museum of the castle's history and of Hiroshima before the bomb, which is a subject the Peace Memorial Museum understandably does not cover — this is the place to understand what the city *was*.

That is the argument for coming here. Most visitors do the Peace Park and leave with an image of Hiroshima that begins in 1945. The castle is where the four preceding centuries are.

In the castle grounds stand several hibakujumoku — survivor trees that were alive on 6 August 1945, within the blast radius, and lived.

A eucalyptus and a willow here are among the closest surviving trees to the hypocentre. They were burned and stripped, and they put out new growth the following spring, at a time when it was widely believed nothing would grow in the city for decades.

They are marked with small signs and almost nobody stops at them. If you visit one thing in these grounds, make it the trees rather than the concrete keep. Roughly 170 of these trees survive across Hiroshima and they are catalogued and monitored; the ones here are the easiest to find.

The moats and the stone walls are original, and they are the best part of the site. Walking the perimeter gives you the actual footprint of a major sixteenth-century fortress on a river delta — Hiroshima means 'wide island', and the castle is the reason the city is where it is.

Within the grounds, the Ninomaru gate complex and turrets were reconstructed in the 1990s using traditional timber methods, unlike the concrete keep. They are worth ten minutes and are usually empty.

Also in the grounds: Gokoku Shrine, rebuilt post-war and busy at New Year, and a preserved concrete bunker that served as an army communications post — it was from here that one of the first reports of the bomb was transmitted.

The castle is about a fifteen-minute walk north of the Peace Memorial Park, or a short tram ride. That proximity is the point: the two sites are the same story from two ends.

A workable sequence is Peace Park and museum in the morning, when you have the emotional energy for it, then the castle and Shukkeien garden in the afternoon as a deliberate change of register. Both are quiet and neither takes long.

Allow about an hour for the castle including the keep museum. If you are short on time and have to choose, walk the moat and find the survivor trees, and skip the interior.