Field Notes: Japan 2005

HIROSHIMA 2005

Hiroshima seems to reinvent itself every decade or so. In the course of my initial extended visit to the city in 1979, I encountered a museum exhibit incorporating a series of photographs taken at ten year intervals; each image -- 1945, 1955, 1965 and 1975 -- found everything present in the preceding picture gone, replaced by newer, taller and more substantial buildings.

This time I stumbled across a display window at the new NHK headquarters building that graphically illustrates this progression. NHK (Nihon Hoso Kyokai) is the Japanese equivalent of PBS in the United States; its branch office in Hiroshima helped deliver news and entertainment to the Japanese public throughout Central Japan.

As the photographs show, their newest skyscraper facility follows on a prewar studio (the cornerstone for which has been transformed into a memorial for NHK staff Atomic Bomb victims) and a larger postwar replacement.

Today the reset of the city appears equally "up to date," full of vibrancy, life and contemporary architectural flair. Clearly the Bomb did not write the city's epitaph.