Hiroshima Castle 広島城
980 m from the hypocentre, it collapsed in 1945; rebuilt in 1958, it closed again in 2026.
Mōri Terumoto began building it in 1589 on a marshy delta at the mouth of the Ōta River: a site with no natural defences, chosen to assert power through the architectural design alone. It then became the base of the Asano family, who governed the Hiroshima domain from here for two and a half centuries; the castle area has been a National Historic Site since 1953. The original tenshu, about 39 metres high (12.4 of them a stone base), had been a National Treasure since 1931: on 6 August 1945, 980 metres from the hypocentre, it withstood the heat of the bomb but not the blast, and collapsed. It was rebuilt in reinforced concrete between October 1957 and March 1958 for about 36 million yen, and in 2006 it joined the hundred finest castles of Japan (no. 73).
Hiroshima
Kenchō-mae
