Qualla: Hiroshima Castle

Hiroshima Castle: Introduction

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Furinkazan1573, CC BY-SA 4.0. The city took its name from the castle, not the other way around. When Mori Terumoto, one of Toyotomi Hideyoshi's Five Elders, chose a river delta on the Inland Sea as the site for his new fortress in 1589, the area had no city at all. It was called Gokamura -- Five Villages -- a scattering of settlements on the marshy islands where the Otagawa emptied into the sea. The name would not do for a castle. "Hiro" was borrowed from an ancestor, Oe no Hiromoto; "shima" from an ally, Fukushima Motonaga, who helped select the site. Some say the name simply means "wide island," a description of the broad delta. Either way, the castle gave Hiroshima its identity, and for more than three hundred and fifty years, the two were inseparable.

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Image: Furinkazan1573 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Hiroshima Castle: Lords of the Delta

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit ThorstenS, CC BY-SA 3.0. Mori Terumoto governed nine provinces from the castle he built between 1589 and 1599, controlling much of western Honshu from his position on the river delta. That authority ended abruptly after the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600, when he backed the losing side and was forced to re...

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Image: ThorstenS | CC BY-SA 3.0

Hiroshima Castle: The Castle and the Bomb

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit そらみみ, CC BY-SA 4.0. By the summer of 1945, Hiroshima Castle housed the headquarters of the Second General Army and the Fifth Division, tasked with defending against a projected Allied invasion of the Japanese mainland. On August 6, 1945, the atomic bomb detonated approximately 820 meters from the ca...

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Image: そらみみ | CC BY-SA 4.0

Hiroshima Castle: Concrete Memory

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit そらみみ, CC BY-SA 4.0. The present castle tower was completed in 1958, rebuilt in reinforced concrete as a replica of the original. Its five floors rise 26.6 meters above a stone foundation that itself stands 12.4 meters high -- proportions that echo the original keep without pretending to be it. The c...

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Image: そらみみ | CC BY-SA 4.0

Hiroshima Castle: The First Broadcast

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. Ningyou assumed (based on copyright claims)., Public domain. Inside the Honmaru -- the castle's innermost compound -- sits a concrete bunker with a specific historical claim: it was the site of the first radio broadcast transmitted from Hiroshima after the atomic bombing. In a city where every communication line had been severed and most s...

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Image: No machine-readable author provided. Ningyou assumed (based on copyright claims). | Public domain