Hi Everyone. Hiroshima, for obvious reasons, is going to be a little different than the others. Before things turn heavy, there’s a stretch in the video of me wandering through the streets — bright lights, sizzling grills, and the comforting smell of things being fried that probably shouldn’t be fried but absolutely should be eaten. It’s lively, noisy, and full of energy. If you dropped into the footage without context, you’d think it was just another vibrant Japanese city doing what vibrant Japanese cities do.

And that’s exactly the point.

Because Hiroshima is that now.

But the deeper I walked toward the Peace Memorial Park, the more the tone naturally shifted. There are places in the world where history doesn’t just sit quietly in a museum. It hangs in the air.

Hiroshima is one of those places.

One thing I learned here surprised me. I had always assumed Hiroshima would have been something like Chernobyl — a massive exclusion zone, poisoned for years by radiation. That’s actually not what happened. The atomic bomb detonated high in the air, roughly 600 meters above the city. Because of that airburst, most of the radiation dispersed upward and was carried away by the wind rather than settling into the ground. Rescue teams were able to enter the city just two days later.

That doesn’t mean the destruction was any less unimaginable.

The bomb did what people often picture — vaporizing those closest to the hypocenter in an instant. But the real horror was experienced by the thousands who didn’t disappear. In a fraction of a second they were hit with a flash of heat hotter than the surface of the sun. Skin burned. Clothes ignited. Buildings, wooden homes, and entire blocks burst into flames simultaneously.

And then the fires truly began to take hold of the city.

Imagine rubble on top of fire on top of rubble. Entire neighborhoods collapsing while still burning. A firestorm that raged for days. Survivors wandering through a city that had essentially turned into a furnace.

It is difficult to grasp the scale of suffering that unfolded here in a single morning.

Which is why the Peace Memorial Park exists.

The park sits almost exactly where the heart of the destruction occurred. One of the few structures left standing — the skeletal remains of the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall — still stands today as the Atomic Bomb Dome. It survived largely because the blast occurred almost directly above it, pushing downward rather than sideways.

Around it, the city has rebuilt everything.

And rebuilt it astonishingly fast.

Within less than ten years, Hiroshima had largely reconstructed itself into a functioning city again. Today it’s a thriving metropolis of over a million people. Walking through it now, you’d never guess the city was almost completely erased in a single morning.

Hiroshima today doesn’t feel frozen in tragedy. It feels alive — full of people, food, transit, laughter, and daily life.

Which somehow makes the story behind it hit even harder.

Things the camera didn’t fully capture

• Hiroshima has a fantastic streetcar system running through the city. It’s one of the few transit systems that actually survived the bombing, and today it’s still moving people around the city with the kind of quiet efficiency Japan seems to have perfected.

• The quiet respect shown by many Japanese visitors at the memorial sites was striking. Many people approached monuments slowly, bowed their heads briefly, and paused for a moment before moving on. It felt similar to the small rituals seen at Shinto shrines — a quiet acknowledgment of something meaningful before continuing on.

As a foreigner I didn’t try to imitate the gestures. Instead I paid my respects in my own way — quietly and thoughtfully — and hopefully in a way that blended respectfully into the moment rather than interrupting it.

• My hostel, WeBase Hiroshima, had one of the more unexpected design themes I’ve encountered on this trip: cats in space. Yes… astronaut cats. Keep an eye out in the video — if you blink you might miss the odd Catstronaut.

When Barack Obama visited Hiroshima in 2016 — the first sitting American president to do so — he closed his speech with the thought that Hiroshima should be remembered not as the dawn of atomic warfare, but as the beginning of humanity’s own moral awakening.

Standing there now, it’s hard not to feel the weight of how unfinished that awakening still is. As a citizen of humanity, it is painful to watch the world stage drifting in the opposite direction — where the stewards of immense power seem more interested in performance, ego, and tribal spectacle than in remembering the terrifying lessons written into places like this. When a civilization powerful enough to shape the fate of the planet begins flirting with decline while rallying behind something as unserious as a loud orange wannabe strongman, what we are witnessing is not wisdom but a kind of deliberate blindness — a collective willingness to look away from the very history that should guide us.

And yet, standing in a place like Hiroshima, hope somehow refuses to disappear. I dare to believe that we might still navigate these turbulent years without having to relearn the most devastating lesson humanity ever taught itself — that some lines, once crossed, can never truly be uncrossed. Places like this exist so we remember that promise… lest we forget.