Overview

• Hiroshima Prefecture opened a virtual-reality booth at the Osaka–Kansai Expo on August 5, featuring a five-and-a-half-minute film that reconstructs pre- and post-bombing scenes around the Atomic Bomb Dome and Aioi Bridge with audio in seven languages.
• On August 3, a memorial service at Koyasan US Betsuin in Little Tokyo, Los Angeles saw 87-year-old hibakusha Howard Kakita call for nuclear abolition and received messages from the mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
• Singer-actor Koji Kikkawa visited the “Hiroshima 1945” exhibition at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum on August 2 and stressed that war must never happen again to highlight the human cost of the bombings.
• The Expo’s VR booth and related exhibitions remain open to the public through August 9 without prior reservation to deepen visitors’ engagement with atomic-bomb history.
• Ahead of the August 6 and 9 anniversaries, survivors and civic leaders are intensifying international appeals for preserving hibakusha testimony and achieving global nuclear disarmament.