Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum

Established in 1955, the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum is located within Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park. It houses artifacts, photographs, and testimonies from atomic bomb survivors, aiming to promote peace and nuclear disarmament. The museum underwent major renovations in 2014, reopening the East Wing in 2017 and the Main Hall in 2019, enhancing its educational programs and exhibits. Visitors can explore the history of Hiroshima before and after the bombing, view personal belongings of victims, and learn about the effects of nuclear weapons. The museum also offers a virtual tour and a Kids’ Peace Station for younger audiences.

Planning your visit

The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum documents what happened at 8.15 on 6 August 1945 and what followed, and it does so primarily through objects belonging to individual people: a tricycle, a school uniform, a watch stopped at the moment of detonation, roof tiles blistered by heat, the shadow of a person burned onto stone steps. The renovated main hall, reopened in 2019, leads with those personal effects and with survivor testimony rather than with statistics or hardware, which is a deliberate curatorial decision and the reason the museum affects visitors as it does.

It stands in the Peace Memorial Park, directly across from the A-Bomb Dome — the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall, left as it stood after the blast — with the cenotaph and eternal flame between them, aligned so that the dome is framed through the arch.

It is difficult, and appropriately so. Allow two hours, and time afterwards in the park.

Bookable options include tours combining the museum with Hiroshima Castle, and private full-day formats pairing it with Miyajima island and the floating torii of Itsukushima shrine — a standard and effective pairing, since the island offers the calm the museum does not. Current availability is listed below.