Photo/Illutration Hiroko Imanaka stands in front of her family’s home, now the site of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. Keisuke Imanaka provided a black and white photo and Hidenori Watanabe, a professor of information design at the Graduate School of the University of Tokyo, colored it to produce this image. (Provided by Keisuke Imanaka)

HIROSHIMA--World leaders trod on hallowed ground when they visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park as part of Group of Seven summit events that kicked off here May 19.

The area was not always covered in pristine lawns and trees, however. It used to be called the Nakajima district and served as the city’s main shopping and entertainment hub with cafes, movie theaters, bathhouses, fruit and vegetable shops, high-end Japanese restaurants and schools.

That all changed on Aug. 6, 1945, when an atomic bomb leveled the city.

The area was home to around 1,300 households comprising 4,400 or so residents, one of whom was Keisuke Imanaka, now 87 years old.

He attended the Mutoku Kindergarten and Nakajima Elementary School nearby.

Imanaka was 9 when the atomic bomb detonated almost right above the Nakajima district, causing the ground surface to shoot up to 3,000 to 4,000 degrees.

It is assumed that almost everyone in the district perished, along with tens of thousands of others.

Imanaka and his family had evacuated to a suburb.

But his 17-year-old sister, Hiroko, was nowhere to be found as she had set off for the city center on that fateful morning.

Their parents searched for her every day amid appalling scenes of devastation.

Two months later, Imanaka’s father died of apparent radiation exposure.

His mother kept waiting in vain for her daughter’s return, and for years afterward would refuse to lock the front door in case she came home.

After the war, the Hiroshima city government covered the area with soil and planted trees.

The result is the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park.

The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, which the G-7 leaders also visited, is situated where Imanaka and his family used to live.

After the war, researchers at Hiroshima University visited former residents to draw a map of how the area once looked. It was like filling in a blank canvas.

The Hiroshima city government excavated an array of artifacts--roof tiles from houses, charred rice scoops and plates--from under the museum’s main building between 2015 and 2017.

78 YEARS SINCE A-BOMBING

A copper plate map that illustrates how the town looked before the atomic blast features in the museum’s main exhibition area, but many visitors don’t notice it or pay no attention.

“Humans do horrific things,” said Imanaka. “It is meaningful for the G-7 leaders to stand on the site of the destroyed town and learn about the grief of the victims and their bereaved families.”

The Hiroshima city government opened the museum in 1955.

Numerous items left by the victims--lunch boxes and clothing, for example--have been donated to the museum. It now has around 22,000 items associated with the bombing.

One of the items is a blouse worn by Sachiko Futagawa, who was 13 at the time.

On Aug. 6, 1945, she was taking part in a government campaign to mobilize students for the war effort.

Her mother, Hiroko, searched everywhere for her, pulling a cart with a futon.

But her remains were never found.

Hiroko’s husband also died in the bombing, forcing her to raise five children on her own.

She never talked about Sachiko to her family and died in 2000.

Fourteen years later, her family found a package wrapped in white paper while they were tidying the contents of a chest of drawers.

The package, which was in the back of a drawer, contained a small blouse that bore Sachiko’s name.

“I imagine my mother didn’t talk about her daughter (Sachiko) because she thought her ‘mind would go numb with sadness’ if she did,” said Kazuhiko, 77, Sachiko’s younger brother. “I believe that my mother never stopped thinking about Sachiko for more than 50 years.”

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