Old banks are urban fortresses. Solidly built and intended to protect valuables, their designs make them the next best thing to an actual bunker for surviving a bomb- even atomic ones at close range.

Uheiji Nagano didn’t have bombs on his mind when he drafted it up in the mid-1930s; the concern was more for economic efficiency as Japan spent more and more on Manchuko and the war in China. Nagano was an older and experienced architect, he would die a year later, and working steel-reinforced concrete, crafted something simpler than what he would have made for Tokyo but still classy and ornate with the Greco-Roman flourishes that were practically mandatory in the era’s banking institutions.

While it was built economically, the basement vault walls were reinforced and no expense was spared on the American steel Herring-Hall-Marvin Safe Co. vaults. The new bank on Rijo Dori (Rijo Street) in Hiroshima’s bustling commercial center opened in August 1936.

I’m guessing they kept banker’s hours in Japan because while Fukuromachi children where already out in the schoolyard doing demolition at 8:15 a.m., the bank’s armored window shutters were still closed and according to signage on site that made a difference in keeping the first two floors from catching fire, though since the bomb exploded 6,000 meters overhead the unprotected skylight was a liability. The blast had enough force to blow the shutters off it and shred the spacious lobby, even bending the barred gate to the vault in the basement.

Unfortunately, the city personnel from the Hiroshima Financial Bureau working on the third floor had already begun their day and thrown open the window shutters. The entire floor caught fire and a dozen staff members were killed.

After the irradiated dust had settled, the bank was battered but functional. The closed vaults and the money within were completely fine and ten of the 18 employees had survived. By Aug. 8 the surviving clerks, with support from other branches, went back to work and the bank reopened. It would stay open until March 1992 and reopen again, as a cultural property and museum in March 2001.

Though the building is entirely open and has points of interest throughout, the vault and basement is the dedicated museum and annex of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. The first exhibit area is a collection of art by survivors that includes their personal stories about what it was like here on Rijo Dori immediately after the bombing. The stories are brief snapshots, strong memories that stood out in the minds of survivors and illustrated by the individual, none of whom were artists giving the graphic imagery a strangely child-like quality. It’s more powerful than if they’d commissioned professionals to illustrate the stories. It’s graphic and honest; I’d not recommend this exhibit to someone bringing small children or who are emotionally overwhelmed easily. My wife had visited the two atomic-bomb surviving schools with me the day before and had opted to stay in the hotel today to recover emotionally, so thankfully was not with me in the basement. I don’t think she would have been able to function for the rest of the day.

The stories are all bilingual and there are Rijo Dori Fieldwork Maps visitors can take that link the art with the location the artist drew, so visitors can walk the street and see the place events occurred. I didn’t walk the full street to do so, but I did go outside to the front of the bank. Two of the pictures depict scenes at the bank and street car station in front of it. It’s the most extreme contrast, the basic drawing a street car with carbonized corpses and naked corpses along what is clearly the side of the bank.

Seeing the barred gate with its repaired but cosmetically still-damaged hinges, gave me more appreciation for just how lucky the survivors in this building were. The bomb hit with enough force that it bent an underground metal gate inside and under a solid reinforced building. The blast must have funneled through the hall like a tidal wave erupting from a drain pipe.

Inside the vaults, which are impressive in their own right, are two exhibits. One is a rotating exhibit that currently features photography taken by American service members in Hiroshima and Nagasaki that was gathered from the Library of Congress, the U.S. Navy and U.S. Air Force collections. These included some previously unreleased imagery of the Hiroshima mushroom cloud and B-29s on Tinian, not secret just no one had bothered to share these particular images before from the collections as far as they know. (If you’ve ever watched or read anything about researching them, American military archives can be impressively out of order and imagery randomly filed.) I found it interesting, though I’d seen a lot of similar imagery while researching the bombings for these stories, seeing post-bombing and aerial imagery can help bring context to words when reading about devastation and the post-war recovery is something that doesn’t get near as much attention as the immediate damage done.

The other vault contains a small collection of debris from the bombing, including roof tiles pulled from the Motoyasu River in 1996, and one of the ubiquitous panoramic post-bombing photos with particular surviving buildings pointed out. I noticed this was one of five banks on this side of the river that were still standing after the bomb.

The vault doors themselves may as well be exhibits too because I couldn’t stop looking at them and admiring their cartoonish thick gleaming steel and over-sized features. As a weird side note, these vaults were made by a company that would later machine uranium slugs for the Department of Energy in the 1940s.

The entire building is fully explorable and while decades of constant use have rendered much of it mundane, little styling details remain from its construction all around the building and a few spots are noted for their historical value. Unfortunately the pre-bombing ornamentation in the main lobby was never replicated and the replacements were rather drab, but if you look at the ceiling it’s maintained its fancy work.

The lobby is rented out and so is constantly changing. What I saw today will be something else next week. As a photographer it’s a bit annoying because I like ‘timeless’ imagery, that is only the permanent items in the image, which is why I usually avoid having people in my pictures unless I need them for scale or to show how much I really hate this crowd. When I visited, the lobby was being prepped for a concert that night using a piano that survived the atomic bomb. I admit, that was actually neat to see. I wish I’d been able to stay for the concert.

Walking the halls I noticed a peculiar feature all over the bank that reinforces my belief that this is an urban fortress. At points in the hall there are these thick door frames without doors. There’s a slit in the overhead and a small hand crank near the floor. A security guard explained that it’s an armored shutter. It’s a new one on me and I’ve not found an explanation as to why this bank has that feature because I’ve not seen it elsewhere.

Upstairs the manager’s office is a mini-museum on the bank branch’s history. The wood paneling and walls were never fixed and so still bear scratches and gauges from glass shards. Supposedly you can see glass slivers still embedded in the wall. I couldn’t but my eyesight isn’t what it should be. I suppose leaving the damaged paneling in the manager’s office was an economic point at first and after while it just became history, so why touch it?

Fukuromachi with its bank and school museums was my last planned stop for this trip before heading out to Okunoshima the following day to see poison gas & bunnies island, but that changed due to my wife. Earlier I’d mentioned she opted to stay in the hotel to rest. She found a museum for us to see that I couldn’t say no to, the Hiroshima City Museum of History and Local Crafts. Not a fan of local crafts? The museum is a red brick army ration cannery built in 1911 and is only a few kilometers from the hypocenter, so it too has a story.

Leaving Fukuromachi I felt that in some ways this was a better way to learn about the atomic bombing than the Peace Museum. The museum has a bigger collection and presentation, but these places shared the same big picture details I would have gotten from it but with the added context of personal stories of people and places along with artifacts displayed where they originated and that’s not something you can replicate in a normal museum setting.

The former Bank of Japan Hiroshima Branch is free and is open daily except Dec. 29- Jan. 1. The bank is almost entirely bilingual and the translations are very good.

A note on bank casualties- the signage outside the bank states that 42 people died inside, but internal signs that explain what happened and get into detail give the impression only 30 employees of the bank and city were inside at the time and that 10 survived, though there may have been other people inside that do not count against these numbers, such as maintenance personnel or visitors.

ADDRESS
Bank of Japan Hiroshima Branch
5-16 Fukuro-machi, Naka-ku, Hiroshima City, 730-0036
0 82-504-2500