Honkawa Elementary School

Honkawa Elementary School stood 410 meters from the atomic bomb's hypocenter on August 6, 1945, closer than any other Hiroshima school. Completed in 1928 as the city's first three-story reinforced concrete building, its walls and basement survived the blast while everything inside was destroyed. The school's principal, ten staff, and around 400 students were killed. Classes resumed in February 1946. Parts of the original structure are now the Honkawa Elementary School Peace Museum, opened in 1988, where black soot from that day still marks interior walls alongside exhibits including a scorched telephone switchboard and a large scale model of the devastated city once displayed in the Peace Memorial Museum.