On the 360 Cities World Panorama site you can see an incredible 360 degree panorama of the city of Hiroshima, taken around 260m from the hypocenter less than two months after the city and much of its population was destroyed by the atomic bomb on August 6, 1945, seventy years ago. The series of pictures was taken by former army engineer Shigeo Hayashi, a Japanese photographer who had worked since 1943 for the magazine ‘FRONT’ and was one of two photographers (and an assistant) chosen by the Japan Film Corporation to document the aftermath of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the Special Committee for the Investigation of A-bomb Damage organized by the Scientific Research Council of Japan (under the Ministry of Education).
In his comments on the image Hayashi states:
On October 1, 1945, I stood at the hypocenter of the Hiroshima atomic bombing and made a slow revolution. In that instant I had a difficulty grasping that this city had been felled by a single explosion. Nothing in my experience had prepared me to conceive of that magnitude of destructive force.
There is also a second panorama by Hayashi taken a little further from the hypocentre.
Other panoramic images on the site include photographs of Hiroshima again in October 1945 by Harbert F. Austin Jr, and the following month by H. J. Peterson.
You can see more of Hayashi’s images – now in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum in their Shigeo Hayashi Photo Exhibition online.
I’ve written on various occasions about the photographs of Hiroshima following the dropping of the bomb and also about the annual commemoration in London which I’ll attend today. There are several posts on this site, including Hiroshima 65 Years On
and Hiroshima Day, which included the picture at the top of this post, of the remarkable peace campaigner the late Hetty Bower, 105 when the picture was taken in 2011.
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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage
All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.
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