Memorial Tower Dedicated to Mobilized Students

This guide to the Memorial Tower Dedicated to Mobilized Students in Hiroshima opens with the blue-green Arita ceramic roof tiles stacked in five tiers above you, the same shape thousands of children were handling on the morning of August sixth, nineteen forty-five. It follows the summer that year, when officials sent students as young as twelve out to tear down houses and clear firebreaks across the city, and the roughly eight thousand four hundred schoolchildren working near this spot when the bomb detonated overhead. You will hear about the decades families spent afterward searching hospital records and memories just to get their children counted among the dead, an effort that became this tower in nineteen sixty-seven.