The Yamaguchi company “Tabimachi Gate Hiroshima” worked with the Archives Department of the Peace Memorial Museum, a local newspaper, and testimonials from survivors to create virtual reality photo clips of five stations around the Peace Park.
On one of the streets of Hiroshima, a tourist turns around, but instead of seeing the vibrant river banks, he finds himself in front of a terrifying scene amidst burning corpses and flames.
The scene is part of a virtual reality-based tour that allows people to see the city before, during and after the atomic attack on August 6, 1945.
It can be a disturbing experience, but Hiroshi Yamaguchi, whose tour company recently started, thinks it can help people better understand the aftermath of nuclear attacks and get a sense of what the city was like before.
“I think even some people who lived in Hiroshima do not know that what is now the Garden of Peace was an integrated city where people lived,” Hiroshi, 44, told AFP.
“By examining it in depth and not just seeing it in pictures, it becomes easier to understand,” he added.
The tour begins at what is now the Hiroshima Park Rest House, which was used by the Fuel Ration Union at the time of the attack.
The rest house is located only 170 meters from the epicenter of the explosion, and all but one of the 37 people who were in the building at the time of the attack were killed.
He was the only survivor in the bunker when the bomb exploded and the tour is based in part on what he saw when he got outside that haunted him for the rest of his life.
In all, about 140,000 people died in the attack and its aftermath.
The Yamaguchi company “Tabimachi Gate Hiroshima” worked with the Archives Department of the Peace Memorial Museum, a local newspaper, and testimonials from survivors to create virtual reality photo clips of five stations around the Peace Park.
Participants walk on a path with headphones that they put on their heads at each stop, allowing them to live the experience in the area as it was before the bomb, during the attack, and after the reconstruction.
The hour-long tour, followed by a panel discussion, was launched in 2021.
“was worse”
“Impressive,” says Sergio Wang, 64, who came from Brazil and tried the first leg of the tour this week.
“When it starts, there are two people on the bridge and all of a sudden…the sound of the plane is heard and then it flashes like a bomb went off,” he says.
“I think it’s amazing to me because I’ve never seen anything like this before. You can walk around and explore whatever you want,” he adds.
“I was able to get a real sense of what it was like,” said Megumi Tabuchi, 60, a resident of Hiroshima who moved to the city three years ago.
“The scenes were clear, as people appeared to be walking around,” she added.
Some found the experience so overwhelming, Yamaguchi explains, that they broke down or cut short the tour.
But children who are shown a different, more stylized version perceive things more easily with virtual reality than with static images of the past, he says.
Yamaguchi’s company focuses on other tourism activities, but he feels an emotional attachment to the Peace Tour project because he is a descendant of the bomb survivors.
“I want to show that there was a past before that and that there was a city that was rebuilt by many,” he says.
Before launching the tour, he asked Hiroshi Harada, a survivor of the attack and former director of the Hiroshima Museum, to try it out.
Harada assured him that the photographs could not capture the smell of people burning or the smell of rotting corpses, things that remained fresh in his memory decades after the attack.
Yamaguchi said Harada “watched it and then said to me, ‘It wasn’t like that. It was worse.
