Hiroshima & Miyajima in 2 Days: Peace Park to the Floating Torii

Atomic Bomb Dome

📍 Otemachi, riverside

Start at the UNESCO-listed Genbaku Dome before the tour buses arrive — the skeletal 1915 exhibition hall left standing almost directly beneath the blast, kept exactly as it stood on 6 August 1945. Walk the river bank around it for the quietest angles.

Children's Peace Monument

📍 Peace Memorial Park

Cross the Motoyasu River into Peace Memorial Park to the statue raised for Sadako Sasaki and the thousands of folded paper cranes sent here from schoolchildren around the world — ring the bell inside the arch.

Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum

📍 Peace Memorial Park

Give the museum a full 90 minutes. The east building sets the city's story before the bomb; the main building holds the personal artifacts — a tricycle, a lunch box, a watch stopped at 8:15 — that make the morning land harder than any statistic.

Okonomimura

📍 Shintenchi, Naka Ward

Lunch in the okonomiyaki theme building: some twenty griddle counters stacked over three floors, each frying Hiroshima-style okonomiyaki — layered, not mixed, over soba noodles. Sit at whichever counter has a free stool and watch yours built layer by layer.

Hiroshima Castle

📍 Motomachi

The 'Carp Castle', a 1958 reconstruction of the 1590s keep destroyed in the blast, now a history museum on five floors with a top-storey lookout over the moat and city — the surviving pre-war trees inside the grounds are survivors of the bomb, marked with plaques.

Shukkei-en Garden

📍 Kaminobori-cho

Finish the day in the 1620 strolling garden built for the Asano lords — 'shrunken scenery' of miniature valleys, bridges and tea pavilions looped around a carp pond. The rainbow-arched Koko-kyo bridge is the postcard shot; it reopens gently lit toward closing.

Itsukushima Shrine

📍 Miyajima Island

Ride the 10-minute ferry from Miyajimaguchi and walk the shore path past the island's deer straight to the vermilion shrine built on stilts over the bay. Check the tide table before you go: high tide floats the great torii; low tide lets you walk out across the sand to its legs. Both are worth planning around.

Senjokaku Pavilion

📍 Above Itsukushima Shrine

Climb the steps to Toyotomi Hideyoshi's 'hall of one thousand tatami mats' — left deliberately unfinished when he died in 1598, all bare timber and sea breeze — with the island's five-storied pagoda standing beside it.

Omotesando Shopping Street

📍 Miyajima ferry town

Early lunch along the arcade between the pier and the shrine: grilled oysters in the shell (Hiroshima grows most of Japan's), anago conger-eel rice bowls, and momiji manju — the maple-leaf cakes baked on hand-cranked irons in the shopfronts. Eat standing where you buy; the deer will inspect anything carried loose.

Miyajima Ropeway

📍 Momijidani Park

Walk up through Momijidani's maple ravine to the ropeway base and ride the two-stage gondola over primeval forest toward the top of the island — the transfer at Kayatani gives the first big view over the Seto Inland Sea.

Mount Misen

📍 Misen summit

From Shishiiwa Station it is a real 30-minute up-and-down trail to the 535 m summit — past the Reikado hall, where a flame first lit by Kobo Daishi in 806 is said to have burned ever since — to the boulder-stacked observatory with a 360° sweep of the islands. Wear shoes you can scramble in.

Daisho-in Temple

📍 Foot of Mount Misen

Descend the Daisho-in route (or ride back down) to the island's oldest temple, a 1,200-year-old Shingon complex where 500 pint-sized rakan statues in knitted caps line the stairways and a hall of sand mandalas sits below the main shrine. Quieter than everything else on the island — time it for the late-afternoon lull before the last comfortable ferry back.