Tourism Hiroshima's peace tourism booms amid international tensions

The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum welcomed a record 945,000 overseas visitors in fiscal 2025, accounting for nearly 40% of all admissions. The increase reflects growing international interest in Hiroshima as conflicts involving nuclear-armed states have renewed attention on one of the world's only cities to have suffered an atomic bombing.

Travellers are also recognising the city's appeal. This year, Tripadvisor ranked a one-day bus tour combining the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park with the nearby island of Miyajima as the world's second-best travel experience, behind only a tour of Porto, Portugal. The eight-hour tour, with prices starting at ¥19,000 (about US$120) for adults, includes visits to Hiroshima's peace sites before continuing to Miyajima, where participants can enjoy the island's scenery and local cuisine in the afternoon.

In 2025, 1.68 million travelers from overseas went to Hiroshima prefecture, Japan Tourism Agency data shows. Foreign visitor traffic at the Peace Memorial Museum has continued to soar, climbing to over 40% of the total in the April-June quarter. An official at the Hiroshima Tourism Policy Department recalls the 2016 visit by Barack Obama -- the first by a sitting U.S. president -- as a "turning point." The ensuing global attention spurred the city to form a roundtable in 2017, including survivors of the Aug. 6, 1945, atomic bombing, and create an example itinerary for foreign visitors. Travel to places associated with tragedies, such as the former site of the Auschwitz concentration camp, often is called "dark tourism." Hiroshima prefers to describe visits to the city as "peace tourism."

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Visitors from the United States made up the largest share of overseas tourists to Hiroshima Prefecture in 2025, accounting for 15.4% of the total, according to the Hiroshima Tourism Association. They were followed by visitors from the United Kingdom at 8.5% and Australia at 7.4%. Nearly 60% of all international visitors came from Europe, the United States and Australia. By contrast, travellers from Asia accounted for just under 20%, a marked difference from the nationwide average, where around 80% of inbound visitors come from Asian countries.

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