Hiroshima National Peace Memorial Hall for the Atomic Bomb Victims (国立広島原爆死没者追悼平和祈念館)

The memorial rests on the 1994 Atomic Bomb Survivors' Assistance Act (Act No. 117), whose Article 41 requires the state to honour the dead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to deepen public understanding of what the bomb did and to hand survivors' experience on to later generations. Three bodies prepared the project: a council on the overall concept in 1991, a review conference on the basic plan in 1993, then a preparation committee from November 1995 that published its final report in September 1998. Construction began in December 1999 and the hall opened on 1 August 2002; the Nagasaki hall followed in July 2003.

In its interim report of 1997 the preparation committee asked that the Hiroshima building fit the general atmosphere of the Peace Memorial Park and adopted a buried structure with two basement levels. The building was designed by Kenzō Tange and his Urban Architecture and Design Institute. The collection of victims' names and portraits began in March 2001.

The building is reinforced concrete, with one storey above ground and two below, and about 3,100 m² of floor space. At ground level stands a monument marking the time of the explosion, 8:15; a fountain there honours those who died looking for water, and roof tiles damaged by the bomb, unearthed during construction, surround it. Standing in front of the monument, one faces the direction of the hypocentre. The entrance is on the first basement level.

From there a ramp winds down counter-clockwise, taking visitors back in time to Hiroshima just after the explosion. Six panels on the ramp wall set out the events that led to the bombing and give an outline of the damage. The ceramics of the ramp and of the hall of remembrance show tiny black grains: the glaze was fired with earth from the bombed soil layer, taken from the site during construction. On the first basement level, a cross-section of ground, peeled off during the excavations before building began, shows beneath the layer used to form the present park the layer that still bears traces of the bombing.

The hall of remembrance, on the second basement level, is a cylinder 55 m round and about 8 m high. Its wall carries a 360-degree panorama of the city after the explosion, seen from around the former Shima Hospital at the hypocentre; it has as many tiles as there were dead at the end of 1945, about 140,000, and builds on a photograph taken by the US army in October 1945. Below the panorama, 226 names of the districts of the time are set in the direction where they lay. At the centre, a monument shows 8:15 and is given water.

The state founded the memorial, which falls under the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare; the Hiroshima Peace Culture Foundation runs it under contract.

On the first basement level, an exhibition room shows films of about 30 minutes on a large screen. The reading room offers, on search terminals in Japanese, English, Chinese and Korean, more than 140,000 survivors' accounts and tributes, video testimonies, photographs of the city before and just after the explosion, and film shot afterwards; some of the accounts and videos are translated into more than twenty languages. On the second basement level, the portrait corner runs the names and portraits of victims, entrusted by their families, across a large monitor; visitors can also look them up one by one on terminals.

The memorial opens every day at 8:30 a.m. (9 a.m. on 6 August) and closes at 5, 6 or 7 p.m. depending on the season (8 p.m. on 5 and 6 August); it is closed only on 30 and 31 December.

It stands in Peace Memorial Park, close to the western end of the Motoyasu-bashi Bridge, a little to the south of the Atomic Bomb Dome.