The Destruction and Creation of a Cityscape in the Digital Age: Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum

Abstract

More than 70 years have passed since the atomic bombs were dropped on Japanese soil. With the atomic bomb survivors aging and the war generation quickly disappearing, the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum urgently needed to address the shift in the nation's demographics. To meet this demand, the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum renewed its permanent exhibition for the third time and reopened the East Hall to the public in April 2017. This most recent renewal project reflected the Planning Committee's understanding that in order to preserve the memories that were beginning to fade, the museum needed to adopt a more powerful and scientifically informative depiction of the horrors of atomic bombs.This article describes how the Planning Committee of this renewal project approached history from the present by creating a cityscape designed to reinforce a sense of place and thereby evoke historical empathy in the viewer. The use of digital technology—projection mapping and computer graphics, for example—assists the museum in achieving its mission of promoting a global ban on nuclear weapons by widening the visitors’ range of view and deepening their understanding of the ‘placeless’ of a city, including its local life, its people, and its identity.