Hiroshima Gokoku Shrine

This guide to Hiroshima Gokoku Shrine opens with a puzzle that investigators wrestled with after the bombing: how a plain wooden torii survived when the concrete buildings around it did not. It follows the gate, which stood about three hundred thirty meters from where the bomb detonated on August 6, 1945, and the photographer Shigeo Hayashi, sent out by a government committee, whose image of it became one of the era's most reprinted photographs. The guide also visits the stone guardian dogs and lanterns nearby, original survivors of that same morning. Stand at today's rebuilt gate and look at the shape investigators spent years puzzling over.