Digitized Footage of Hiroshima before A-Bombing Released Online

Hiroshima, July 5 (Jiji Press)--The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum released online Wednesday digitally processed 16 millimeter film footage showing the central area of the western Japan city of Hiroshima about 10 years before its devastation by the U.S. atomic bombing. The original film is the only footage owned by the museum depicting the area before World War II. The footage is "valuable data that clearly shows how Hiroshima looked like before being atomic-bombed," said a staff member at the museum. The United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, and another on the city of Nagasaki, southwestern Japan, three days later, in the closing days of the war. The three-minute black-and-white video was originally shot by late Genjiro Kawasaki, a resident of Hiroshima, for his own amusement. It shows, among other things, cherry blossoms, people dressed in fine kimono clothing at a shopping street and the Atomic Bomb Dome before being ravaged by the nuclear attack. The museum spent some 900,000 yen to digitize the original film, donated in 1963, remove scratches and make it high-resolution, as the state of the film and the image quality were very bad. Writing on a movie theater sign and tram numbers, both of which were unreadable in the original film, are clearly shown in the digitized footage, allowing detailed research on the situation of the city center at the time, according to museum officials. The museum now believes that the film was shot around April 1935, not around 1936 as previously thought, based on the release date of the movie at the theater, the officials said. END