Peace Memorial Museum

The museum is housed in two buildings: the Main Building (Tange’s elevated 1955 structure on pilotis) and the East Building, connected by a corridor. The renovated route now sends you through the Main Building first — survivor belongings, photographs, written testimony, charred lunch boxes, a melted tricycle — before the East Building’s broader historical and political context. The reverse order works too if it’s crowded; the Main Building is the harder, more concentrated section.

English audio guides are available for ~¥400 and are worth it; the captions are good but the audio adds survivor voices. Open 8:30 a.m. (7:30 in August) to 6 or 7 p.m. depending on season; the last entry is 30 minutes before closing. Closed December 30-31. Combine the visit with the park itself in a single morning, then lunch and recover.

Current hours: 7:30-19:00 (until 20:00 in August; until 18:00 December-February). Admission ends 30 minutes before closing. Advance reservations are required to visit during the first hour and during the last 90 minutes of the day; the middle hours are walk-in. Adult admission is ¥200, reduced rates for students and seniors. The Peace Memorial Hall for the Atomic Bomb Victims, adjacent to the museum, is free to enter and holds a National Register of the names of those who died — over 330,000 names as of recent counts. On the second Sunday of every month, public readings of personal stories are held in the Memorial Hall.

The museum surveys not just the bombing itself but the political decisions behind it: the Manhattan Project, the choice of target cities, the debate in Washington, and the aftermath of surrender. The East Building provides this strategic context, while the Main Building is deliberately intimate — a single victim’s belongings, a child’s burned uniform, a watch stopped at 8:15. The combination of macro-history and personal scale is why this museum hits differently than a conventional war museum.

Access: tram lines 2 or 6 from Hiroshima Station to Genbaku Dome-mae (15 minutes, ¥240), then a short walk south through the park. The museum sits at the south end of the Peace Memorial Park axis. Peak season (summer, especially early August around the August 6 anniversary) has significant queues; online pre-booking for the time-restricted slots is strongly recommended.