Christopher Mead, Ph.D.
Emeritus Regents’ Professor, University of New Mexico

The Hiroshima Peace Memorial was designed and built between 1949 and 1955 as a permanent monument to world peace by the great Japanese modernist, Tange Kenzō. The monument seems so complete and self-evident that few visitors stop to ask an obvious if overlooked question: Why is the Peace Memorial not located at the hypocenter, the elevated site where the atomic bomb Little Boy detonated 1903 feet in the air and annihilated an entire city in less than a second on August 6, 1945? Why is the Peace Memorial in fact located some 1200 feet distant from the hypocenter on another of Hiroshima’s many islands? It is as if we had decided to erect the 9/11 Memorial, not where the World Trade Center Towers stood until September 11, 2001, but elsewhere in New York City, on Wall Street for example. In this talk, I take on this question by locating Tange Kenzō’s design at the intersection of Western paradigms of architecture and planning codified by Le Corbusier with Japanese traditions of cultural space and architecture. These traditions engage both Shintō and Buddhist beliefs and are rooted ultimately in the himorogi — the sacred Shintō enclosure where earth meets sky, and humans gather to welcome spirits called kami. Shaped by a sense of time and space unlike what we in the West assume when speaking of place, the himorogi answers our question in ways that we do not expect.