Monument to Toge Sankichi

A simple monument in Hiroshima's Peace Memorial Park honors poet Toge Sankichi, who was 28 and living three kilometers from the hypocenter when the atomic bomb fell on August 6, 1945. The experience shaped his writing for the rest of his life. His collection Poems of the Atomic Bomb, published in 1951 while he was hospitalized, gained international attention at the Berlin World Youth Peace Festival that year. In the censored postwar years, when Allied occupation forces restricted information about the bombing, Toge's work became a significant source of documentation. He also spoke out against nuclear weapons during the Korean War. He died in 1953 at 36.