Hiroshima

Hiroshima - darkometer rating : 10 - (cf. Top 20 dark tourism destinations ) A city in Japan – and the site of one of the deadliest catastrophes in human history, namely the first use of an atomic bomb as an act of war (at the end of WWII ) – and thus the name Hiroshima alone stands for man-made tragedy as much as otherwise perhaps only Auschwitz does. In fact, while at Auschwitz more people were killed over several years, the nuclear blast at Hiroshima killed more people in an instant than any other killing in history. And of course, many more died of the immediate and long-term after-effects. The city of Hiroshima has devoted itself to the promotion of peace ever since. The sites one can visit here as a dark tourist rank amongst the world's best. > More background info > What there is to see > Location > Access and costs > Time required > Combinations with other dark destinations > Combinations with non-dark destinations > Photos More background info: Many guidebooks open their sections introducing Hiroshima by saying that "for the worst of reasons" Hiroshima needs no introduction. This holds particularly true for the dark tourist, of course. What makes Hiroshima so iconic is not just the sheer enormity of the human loss, it also signifies the human race's fall from grace as far as this entirely new level of using a weapon of mass destruction is concerned. It marked the beginning of the nuclear age, in which the "overkill" capacity of the subsequently amassed nuclear arsenals could have meant (and still could mean) the end of civilization at large if unleashed, as "a hundred thousand Hiroshimas" (i.e. in World War III ). Conversely, the anti-nuclear arms peace movement promoted by the city under the motto "No more Hiroshimas" is on a par with the German call "Nie wieder Auschwitz " ('never again Auschwitz').