Hiroshima, chief town of a prefecture, lies on the Inland Sea in western Honshu. Traversed by six arms of the River Ota, the city extends into Hiroshima Bay in the pattern of a human hand. Hiroshima gained a melancholy place in history when it became the target of an atomic bomb in 1945. Now rebuilt, it is the largest city
and the administrative, educational and tourist center of the Chugoku district.
On the coast to the south of the town are large industrial installations (petrochemicals, metalworking, shipbuilding and automobile manufacture, together with agricultural products and fish processing).
History
In 1593 Mori Terumoto (1553-1625) built a castle at the mouth of the Ota, naming it Hiroshima-jo ("far stretching islands"); and this name soon began to be applied to the whole of the settlement which grew up here. The town was the seat of the Mori and Fukushima families and later of the Asano, who laid the foundations of its further development.
After the Asano family fell from power under the Meiji Reforms the harbor was enlarged by the municipality; and a further impetus was given to its town's development by the construction of the railway from Kobe to Shimonoseki, which passed through Hiroshima (1894). Conveniently situated as it was, Hiroshima became the Imperial Headquarters during the war with China in 1894-95; and the stationing of troops here during this war and later led to the establishment of various institutions and industrial installations in the town, which by 1940 had become Japan's seventh largest town, with a population of 344,000.
On August 6, 1945 at 8:15am local time, the United States Air Force dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, completely destroying the city, killing an estimated 260,000 people and injuring more than 160,000. It was then thought that the site would remain uninhabitable for decades, but in fact reconstruction began in 1949, and by 1974 the city had doubled its pre-war population.
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