Rebuilding a community: Hiroshima after the bomb
Alex K.T. Martin

"A street running between what is now the Hiroshima Museum of Art and the Rihga Royal Hotel Hiroshima in the early 1950s. | COURTESY OF MOTOMACHI PROJECT "
Hiroshima – On the back of Hiroshi Okumoto’s business card is the old address of the hardware store his grandfather founded in 1891: Lot number 12, Harimaya-cho, Hiroshima-shi.

The locale, now part of a district collectively known as Hondori, is home to the city’s landmark pedestrian shopping street — the largest of its kind in the region and whose bustling arcades are testament to how Hiroshima reinvented itself following the devastating blast from an atomic bomb on Aug. 6, 1945.

“A black market began forming around Hiroshima Station after the war, but soon there were efforts to bring back businesses to Hondori, where our shop and the shōtengai (commercial district) were,” says Okumoto, as he lays out a copy of a handwritten map showing the community before the bomb, nicknamed “Little Boy,” detonated 600 meters above it.

The impact of the explosion, equivalent to around 15,000 tons of TNT, obliterated all 160 or so shops and houses that used to crowd the neighborhood’s alleys. Over 850 people who were in the area at the time were killed instantly. Across the city, roughly 92% of all buildings were destroyed or burned, while approximately 140,000, or 40% of its population, are said to have died within a year of the nuclear annihilation.


The Hondori neighborhood of Hiroshima before the atomic bombing. Toward the far left is a sign for Okumoto’s hardware store. | MASUDA TAKANORI / VIA HIROSHI OKUMOTO
“Humankind has been in conflict for thousands of years as civilization developed,” says 92-year-old Okumoto at the office of the Hondori Shopping Street Promotion Association, just a block away from the home he rebuilt after the United States carried out the world’s first atomic bombing.

Stories shared by atomic bomb survivors, or hibakusha, such as Okumoto and records of the city’s herculean reconstruction efforts are more poignant than ever as geopolitical tensions mount and the war in Ukraine drags on under the ever-present threat of nuclear war — one of the main topics of discussion at the upcoming Group of Seven summit being held in Hiroshima.

“The situation in Ukraine overlaps with what Hiroshima went through,” says Okumoto, who lost six family members to the bomb. “It’s about time we stop the infighting and live peacefully or else our planet will be destroyed.”

‘All alone’
Then 15 years old, Okumoto had been mobilized as a student worker at a lumberyard 4.1 kilometers from the hypocenter. His parents and youngest sister — who was 4 at the time — were home at the hardware shop, while his two younger brothers and sister were either at school or had been deployed to help create firebreaks.

Okumoto recalls a giant, dark mushroom cloud rising behind Hijiyama, a hill overlooking the city. He and his schoolmates began walking toward the ominous plume, crawling over debris and passing by charred bodies and scorched survivors with their skin peeling off like gloves.

He reunited with his mother, Hisako, two days later at an evacuation center. She only had minor cuts, but died on Aug. 14 after suffering from diarrhea and an inability to eat. Okumoto was massaging her legs when she motioned him to stop. “That’s enough,” were her last words.

He soon discovered that his father, Yaezo, had died two days earlier, likely from radiation poisoning. Tiny bone fragments of his youngest sister, Taeko, were salvaged from the ruins of his house, while the remains of his three other siblings, sister Fumiko and brothers Katsuhiko and Naomichi, were never found.

“I was all alone, and together with my surviving grandmother went to stay with relatives in Takamatsu,” he says, referring to the capital of neighboring Kagawa Prefecture. “But I returned in 1949, and by 1951 was able to erect a small house on our property in Harimaya-cho.”

Seeds of revival
Taking the lead in rebuilding the Hondori community was the late Ryoichi Nakayama, the owner of a music shop just four doors down from the Okumoto family’s hardware store. According to the book, “History of the Hiroshima Hondori Shopping Arcade,” he used the neighborhood association directory to contact the area’s residents who were seeking refuge in the countryside during the war.


A street running between what is now the Hiroshima Museum of Art and the Rihga Royal Hotel Hiroshima in the early 1950s. | COURTESY OF MOTOMACHI PROJECT
On Sept. 15, 1945, Nakayama and nine other merchants gathered for their first meeting to discuss what to do. Two days later, however, Typhoon Ida pummeled Hiroshima, killing over 2,000 and flooding a wide swath of the city.

Nakayama was unfazed. He convinced landlords in Hondori to prioritize accepting tenants who had businesses in the neighborhood before the mass devastation, in an effort to bring them back.

“One of the first shops to open in Hondori, as I recall, was a shokudō (diner),” Okumoto says.

This was in early 1946. Nakayama had also assembled a shack on his property around the same time, selling harmonicas and vinyl records by its entrance. Occupation force officers would walk by his makeshift store and leave cigarettes and chocolate bars.

More retailers followed, although food and resources were scarce. There wasn’t much to sell; inflation was skyrocketing and goods like rice and pots were often bartered.

Still, the community slowly regrouped. Okumoto returned to his address in Harimaya-cho — at that point just a small plot of bare land — in March 1949. He built a house on the property. His aging grandmother, however, no longer recognized where she was and died in April 1951. That autumn, Okumoto married his wife, Yoko, and soon found a job at a hardware wholesaler in the city, where he worked for the next decade.

“I was initially planning to resume the hardware business that my grandfather’s generation started, but large home improvement centers began opening and there wasn’t much demand for mom-and-pop hardware stores,” he says. “Instead, I opened a men’s clothing shop on our property in 1963, focusing on neckties, shirts and belts.”

By then, the city’s infrastructure had been restored, and Japan was cruising on one of the most rapid economic growth trajectories the world has ever seen. Over the next 40 years, Okumoto watched his city develop as he busied himself with his apparel business.

City of water
One of the first things visitors will notice when arriving in Hiroshima is the extensive networks of rivers and bridges connecting parts of the city. Built on the delta of the Ota River, the area evolved according to the surrounding waterways and land reclamation projects dating back to the Edo Period (1603-1868).

During the Meiji Era (1868-1912), the city saw the construction of a major port, as well as the opening of the Sanyo Railroad and the streetcar system. It was also a military center, home to the 5th Division, one of the six regional commands created in the Imperial Japanese Army. It served as a temporary capital of Japan during the Sino-Japanese War, when the Imperial Headquarters moved from Tokyo to Hiroshima, along with Emperor Meiji.

“Hiroshima’s concentration of military facilities and its size and layout made it a suitable site for the Americans to test the bomb’s destructive powers,” says Shoichiro Hara of the prefecture’s Peace Promotion Project Team.

As is the case with many who hail from the city, the 32-year-old official’s family history is entwined with the horrors of war. Hara’s grandmother is a hibakusha. An elementary school student at the time, she was playing at her home near Hiroshima Station when the blast ripped through the windows. An avalanche of broken glass killed her older sister.

“She used to tell me about her experience,” Hara says at the prefectural government headquarters, the slick building’s entrance adorned with posters of the upcoming G7 summit.

The city was an apocalyptic wasteland in the aftermath of the bombing, Hara continues. Transportation and communication facilities, as well as water and sewage systems, were severely damaged.


A view toward the Hiroshima Prefectural Office from the Municipal Motomachi High-Rise Apartment in 1971. | COURTESY OF MOTOMACHI PROJECT
Citizens immediately began fixing the infrastructure, however. On Aug. 8, just two days after the bombing, the Sanyo Line reopened, albeit only between Hiroshima and Yokogawa, the next station. On Aug. 9, the day of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, streetcar operations were partially restored. Bridges were repaired and main streets were cleared of debris to allow the flow of traffic to resume.

Fixing the waterworks was an arduous task, Hara says, as water leaked and spouted at many locations. It took nine months to reinstate water supply to the outskirts of the city. The sewage system encountered similar problems, as drainage pumps had to be repaired and sewer pipes maintained.

Meanwhile, the city was gathering reconstruction ideas from both the public and private sectors, with ambitious projects involving wider roads, green areas and land readjustment plans being pursued.

Financial difficulties persisted, however, prompting the mayor, city council members and others to lobby the central government, leading to the enactment of a law in 1949 that paved the way for special assistance from Tokyo. That same year, architect Kenzo Tange’s plan for the peace park was accepted, and construction of the landmark memorial commenced in 1951.

While basic infrastructure was on the mend, one issue continued to dog the city: housing shortages. “That brings us to the Motomachi apartments,” Hara says.

A-bomb slum
Around a 15 minute walk from Hara’s office is a vast municipal housing complex consisting of rows of mid-rise apartments and a series of high-rises zigzagging around an outdoor public space.

There’s a multiethnic, labyrinthine quality to the place. A cobweb of dim corridors connect the structures; Chinese eateries and Asian grocers dot the apartments’ shopping and restaurant arcade; a South Asian family slowly pushing a stroller disappears behind a corner.

The buildings were Hiroshima’s answer to the so-called genbaku suramu (A-bomb slum), a term that was used to describe one of the largest squatter settlements in Japan that sprang up following the war along the Aioi Street in Motomachi, a central district of the city.

Known for housing many military facilities and private factories, the neighborhood was particularly hard-hit by the A-bomb. Following Japan’s surrender, the land was freed up for public use with government offices, hospitals and schools constructed on the east side. To accommodate war victims and repatriates, however, the west side was converted into residential land, where wooden barracks were built.

These shacks continued to multiply during the 1950s and 1960s. Numerous unauthorized wooden homes were squeezed next to each other along the east embankment of the Ota River, their numbers nearing 1,000. Packed tightly together, they were a serious fire hazard, with occasional outbreaks burning down sections of the neighborhood.

To resolve the situation, the city and prefecture had constructed 30 mid-rise apartment buildings by the late 1960s, but they weren’t enough to accommodate the residents.

A new redevelopment plan was sought, and architect Masato Otaka was commissioned.

Motomachi apartments
Otaka, who had worked at the same architecture firm as Tange and was involved in the metabolism movement, envisioned creating an entire town centered on mixed-use residential high-rises equipped with a kindergarten, elementary school, medical clinic, public bathhouse, fire station and police station, among other facilities.

There was a noticeable Le Corbusier influence in the design, with roof-top gardens and supports featured, as well as on open facade by the time construction wrapped up in 1978.


Motomachi apartments at night | ALEX K.T. MARTIN
“Since the 2000s, however, the residents here have aged significantly,” says Jun Masuda, a part-time lecturer at Hiroshima City University. She’s also on the staff of the Motomachi Project, a collaborative initiative between her university and the city’s Naka Ward aimed at revitalizing the community and preserving its legacy.

“There are many foreigners living here now, too,” she says in a ground floor room in the Motomachi apartments. The renovated property displays historical photographs of the area and other archival material pertaining to the development of the complex.

According to the city, as of April last year those ages 65 and older account for approximately 45% of the nearly 4,200 residents of the municipal apartments, far higher than the national average. Meanwhile, those of foreign nationalities comprise around 26.5% of the community’s population.

“So on the one side we have rapidly graying old-time residents, and on the other side we’re seeing an influx of foreign tenants. Community ties were weakening and communicating among residents was becoming difficult due to language differences,” Masuda says. “So what we’re trying to do is to build a bridge between residents through cultural activities.”

Art students from Masuda’s university have painted the shutters along the shopping alleys and photo exhibitions have been hosted in an open property that was turned into a gallery. As Masuda walked through the concrete alleyways linking the apartments, residents, including mothers with young children, waved and greeted her.

“We now have younger artists taking up residence in some of the apartments and we help out with local festivals and sporting events,” she says.

The retro-modern architecture, the multiracial tenants and its prime location — situated in close proximity to the Peace Memorial Park and Hiroshima Castle — gives the Motomachi apartments a distinct atmosphere. It’s simultaneously an enduring relic of Hiroshima’s tumultuous past and a reflection of what the city, and perhaps the rest of Japan, should be prepared for as the graying, shrinking nation undergoes an unprecedented demographic transition.

“It’s a strange place,” says Tadashi Yoshimura, the owner of a standing bar in Fukuromachi, a downtown area near Hondori. “I grew up here but I don’t think I’ve ever visited the apartments,” he says. “I know it’s a symbol of Hiroshima’s reconstruction, but it also seems to carry the darker history of the city.”


Motomachi apartments | ALEX K.T. MARTIN
On March 14, a group of Ukrainian government officials headed by Anna Yurchenko, deputy minister for infrastructure, communities and regions, visited the Motomachi apartments and talked to residents as part of a tour hosted by the World Bank.

“As we work toward a peaceful and more prosperous future, it is critical for Ukraine to start preparing for its reconstruction,” said World Bank Group President David Malpass during an opening speech of a symposium held the next day. “The city of Hiroshima is an inspiring venue for today’s discussions with a history of resiliency in the face of great adversity.”

The toll of war
Back in Hondori, Okumoto, the hibakusha, explains that he closed his men’s apparel shop when his wife died in 2001. He now lives with his son and daughter-in-law on the same property, along with memories of his parents and siblings.

“I was fortunate enough to find this,” he says, pulling out a photocopied image of a colorized group photo.

“What’s this you have?” asks Aina Mori, a staff member of Hondori’s promotion association. Her tone is gentle, as if speaking to her own grandfather.

Okumoto faintly smiles as he stares down at the picture, his shoulders hunched.

“It’s the only photograph remaining of my family, taken back in March 1943, I believe, in Miyajima,” he says, referring to the small island home to the Itsukushima Shrine and its giant torii gate. Miyajima is also one of the sites world leaders plan to visit during this month’s G7 summit.

“The kid standing in the middle is me,” he says, pointing to a boy wearing a school uniform and hat.

Everyone else in the image would perish two years later.