Hiroshima 08:15

Sixty years ago tomorrow morning at 08:15, the world's first atomic bomb to be dropped in anger exploded above the Japanese city of Hiroshima. It is estimated that the bomb claimed around 140,000 lives due to the initial blast and the resultant radiation by 1945, rising to today's estimates of 240,000 victims. There are plenty of political theories regarding the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but there is no doubting their terrible effectiveness.

The anniversary is to be marked by a ceremony in the Hiroshima Peace Park, which I visited last May when I spent a day exploring the city. I had been over to see my brother in Osaka who was working as an English teacher and had planned to make the trip before I arrived in Japan. The shinkansen bullet train took me sedately and swiftly to Hiroshima from Osaka in a couple of hours. The day was bright and hot and as I exited the station I saw that Hiroshima was much like any busy modern Japanese city.

After finding my bearings with a quick trip to the station's tourist office to pick up local maps, I took the tram which would take me to the city's Peace Park. Everyday workers crowded the tram and schoolchildren in their quirky naval-looking uniforms hopped on and off. The tram stop for the park is opposite the A-Dome, the only building to remain standing in the vicinity of the blast as the bomb exploded directly above it, razing everything else around it.

The A-Dome was left as a memorial in its shattered but erect state. I felt quite moved by this building, standing incongruously alone like a scar in the midst of the pretty gardens which make up the Peace Park, a stoic marker of the bomb. This feeling was consolidated when I visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and saw pictures of the A-Dome taken not long after the bombing. It looked much as it does now, only standing even more remotely in the blackened wasteland surrounding it caused by the bomb's destructive force. That Hiroshima has regenerated and that the park (without its shattered monument) resembles any other city park in the world, is testament to human resilience and endeavour.

In another three days the city of Nagasaki will hold its own remembrance ceremony to mark the anniversary of the second nuclear bomb (with a plutonium core as opposed to the uranium one used on Hiroshima) to be dropped. This bomb claimed 70,000 lives initially with estimates of up to 140,000 eventual victims. These anniversaries mark an historical episode which shows the human capacity for destruction, and though superficially the cities have healed, the mental scars remain as do the lessons to be learnt.