広島 (Hiroshima)

広島 (Hiroshima) is the center of a metropolitan area with a population of 1.891 million,¹ 1.174 million of which live in the city proper.² It is located on the shore of the Seto Inland Sea in western Honshū Island, in 広島 (Hiroshima) Prefecture, ⽇夲 (Nippon),³ on the delta of the Ōta River. The city was mostly destroyed by an atomic bomb dropped by the United States of America during World War II, and the horror is memorialized by the Genbaku (or Atomic) Dome, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The dome is the skeletal remains of a building near the blast epicenter.

The tallest building as of early 2014 is the 43 story Urban View Grand Tower (2004).⁴

Within the metropolitan area is the city of 廿日市 (Hatsukaichi), which includes the island of Itsuku; the Itsukushima Shrine is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, honoring the ancient Shinto shrine and those Buddhist buildings that survived the persecutions of the Meiji Restoration.⁵ The city has a population of 115 thousand.⁶

External references

Itsukushima Shinto shrine, Hatsukaichi, Nippon (Japan)

Historical maps

Footnotes

1. 2012 calculation from world-gazetteer.com, accessed 2/6/2013.
2. 2010 figure from the side banner of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroshima, accessed 7/2/2014.
3. In less formal contexts the pronunciation shifts to the more modern: Nihon. In English: Japan.
4. Emporis.com, accessed 7/2/2014.
5. UNESCO, World Heritage Sites (Firefly Books, 2010).
6. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_Japan, accessed 3/25/2014.