If you’re looking for the most concentrated bursts of human death in history, #1 and #2 both took place in the same week in the summer of 1945.

On Monday, 6th August, at 8:15, the uranium-235 fission bomb named Little Boy detonated over Hiroshima, killing roughly 70,000 civilians in a matter of minutes.

Just three days later, the plutonium-239 bomb Fat Man killed 40,000 in Nagasaki.

Having spent my time in Japan so far eating sushi and looking at its beautiful trees, I couldn't ignore the urge to take an excursion to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and explore this once brutalised city's journey from annihilation to thriving metropolis.

Radiation

As I walked through the Hiroshima Peace Museum, it became painfully clear that the mortality figures fail to do these horrific moments of the 20th century justice.

Roughly the same number of people as who died in the initial blasts died slowly and in agony over the following months due to radiation sickness and its associated conditions.

In a morbid way, those who died immediately were the lucky ones.

And as devastating as this is, it's not the only tragedy upon which the memorial made me dwell.

At the time of the blast, there was essentially no public understanding of radiation or its effects.

This resulted in misinformation that created a life-altering stigma for anyone deemed to have been close to the blast. As if surviving it wasn't traumatic enough.

Stigma

The term “おせんされているひと” (contaminated person) appeared on housing refusals and in marriage negotiations over the following decades.

Women who were too near either blast were believed to be either infertile or incapable of giving birth to healthy children.

Potential in-laws would carry out extensive background checks and refuse marriage proposals as a result.

“けっこんできないひと” (people who cannot marry) was the term used, and women had no choice but to hide their past, even from those closest to them. Silence is how they had to deal with the most horrendous event of their lives.

Hibakusha

The closing exhibit, the one I shall never forget, tracks one of these so-called hibakusha (a person affected by explosion).

The man survived the blast and initial dose of radiation, but suffers from a painful illness which he is unable to get diagnosed.

He becomes worn down slowly over the decades by a concoction of chronic pain and stigma, resulting in him losing his job, his house, then his wife and his children.

The story ends, inevitably, with his suicide.

This concluding exhibit is situated in a windowless, dimly lit gallery, beyond which visitors exit immediately into a long corridor overlooking the stunning vista of the surrounding park.

I came out to find hundreds of visitors, from all over the world, sitting or standing in complete silence, not on their phones, but stunned into quiet reflection.

Seeing the mid-morning sun reflecting off the park's monuments and cherry blossoms from this soft, sound-dampened corridor, I was overwhelmed with complex, acute feelings of woe transitioning to hope.

I stood there trying my best to comprehend, not just the magnitude of death, but also trying to picture a city, made mostly of wood, flattened in a matter of seconds.

Integrating these thoughts with this stunning park, striking architecture, and bustling, modern city in front of me was, for lack of a grander word, difficult.

Yet I was booted from these reflections when a heavy woman burst through the exhibit exit, dropped her phone, kicked it several times as she struggled to pick it up, all the time screeching with laughter like a mating fox.

The spell was broken. For everyone.

Hundreds of phones came out of pockets, conversations about taxis began, and collectively, the corridor of visitors moved on with life.

Hope

Later that afternoon, I took a ferry across to Miyajima Island, and as the famous torii gate and the slopes covered in blossoms were coming into view, I continued to think about how this city and its people had excelled, given their utter desolation 80 years ago.

Perhaps part of the answer lay on this island?

Primarily a religious and spiritual retreat packed with temples, shrines, and parks, Miyajima was not a prime target for bombing during the war.

It is also around 20 kilometres from Little Boy’s hypocentre, meaning it wasn’t subjected to any direct radiation effects.

In 1945, panicked citizens fled in all directions after the blast.

Some of them travelled to this unscathed island.

The contrast must have been incredible, perhaps even serving as an anchor of hope.

Refugees arriving in August and September would have walked through 紅葉谷 (the Maple Valley), seeing the greens beginning to turn to scarlet and gold.

Walking up the forest paths of Mount Misen, these hibakusha would have seen shrines, monks, and deer, all settled quietly into the landscape and completely at peace.

As I attempted to retrace these steps around the island, I could see how this magical island might have had a restorative effect for these displaced people, giving them enough rest and hope to face returning home to rebuild their lives and city.

But although Miyajima might, in some small but significant way, have helped them initiate this new and gruelling chapter of their lives, there must have been something else that gave these hibakusha a foothold in normalcy—to help keep them going during the decades of hard graft to come.

Baseball

After returning to the mainland, I found one of the answers.

While walking around the city I came across the Mazda Zoom-Zoom Baseball Stadium, home of the Hiroshima Toyo Carp.

The team was founded four years after the bombings and, in 1950, entered the Japan Central League for the first time, finishing last.

They spent the next few years making marginal gains in the league while large parts of their city still lay in ruins, with sewers, transport, and homes still to be rebuilt.

The team had no investors, save a few local businesspeople.

To their fans and everyone else, they gave hope that their city was alive, and showed that Hiroshima intended to rejoin national life as participants, rather than victims.

Throughout the late 50s and 60s the team struggled to break into the top half of the Japan Central League.

By now, some essential basic infrastructure had been rebuilt, but even after two decades of toil, the city remained a province compared to nearby metropolises of Kyoto and Osaka.

Yet fans of the Carp were famously loyal and dedicated.

They became known for staying to the end of every game, no matter how badly the team was losing.

Winning was never expected.

The fans were there to support and join in solidarity with the collective hardship, not for entertainment and a sense of victory.

Disarmament

By the mid 1970s, Hiroshima had become the loudest voice for peace and nuclear disarmament, through its literature, politics, and architecture.

It was catching up at a faster pace to other modern cities, and life was becoming a little more comfortable and certain.

In 1975, the Hiroshima Toyo Carp won the Japan Central League, and then in 1979, the Japan Series.

Yet there was no gloating, no over-the-top celebrations or kicking over bins. One newspaper simply wrote, “Hiroshima smiles quietly.”

In a way, this victory shifted Hiroshima’s identity from “that poor bombed city” to “the city that will not give up.”

Hiroshima had not only recovered and survived, but it was now excelling on national and international levels.

Peace

Hiroshima leads the Mayors for Peace campaign, a global body of over 8,000 cities that regularly submits statements to the UN advocating for nuclear disarmament.

The city’s peace park and atomic bomb dome have been designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Even within Japan, Hiroshima is famed for its winter oysters and unique take on the dish, okonomiyaki.

After my walk through the city, I was hungry and wanted to sample these oysters for myself.

I chose what I judged to be a pretty classic Japanese restaurant setup: a couple of men cooking teppanyaki-style for about sixteen customers sitting at the counter, watching.

I pointed and ordered, and the chefs nodded amiably.

They were very polite and friendly, but not in the forced, thinly veiled way I’d experienced elsewhere in Japan.

My chef spoke no English save for “butter?”

He had his priorities straight.

And the oysters were cooked perfectly.

When I stepped out of the restaurant into the cool evening air, city life carried on in the tranquil way it tends to when fleetingly observed.

Its restaurants filled, its trains ran, and in the Mazda stadium, the Hiroshima Toyo Carp had just scored four late runs to sweep the Tokyo Yakult Swallows.

I struggled to reconcile this scene with my morning visit to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum.

And perhaps that is the point.