President Petr Pavel in front of the A-bomb Dome
Text: H.E. Mr. Kansuke Nagaoka, Ambassador of Japan to the Czech Republic; Photo: Shutterstock
The citizens of Hiroshima warmly welcomed the Czech President, and Mayor Matsui himself guided the guests around the A-bomb Dome memorial, including the inside area, which is usually not open to visitors.
Eighty years ago, in August 1945, when Hiroshima was attacked by the world’s first nuclear bomb, the city was one of the industrial and commercial centers of western Japan. The citizens were proud of their newly built Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall, designed by architect Jan Letzel from Náchod in the eastern Czech Republic. Despite being very close to the hypocenter, miraculously, its skeleton survived and later became the A-bomb Dome, planned to be preserved indefinitely as a silent witness to the disaster. 2025 also marks the 100th anniversary of Mr. Letzel’s rather early demise.
In this doubly memorable year, President Pavel visited Hiroshima while staying in Japan to participate in the Czech National Day at the Osaka-Kansai Expo.
The citizens of Hiroshima warmly welcomed the President from Letzel’s homeland, and Mayor Matsui himself guided the guests around. The inside of the A-bomb Dome is usually not open to visitors, but we received a special invitation and thus had the opportunity to intently listen to the mayor’s explanation while wearing helmets in the scorching heat.
Commemorating the victims at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park
After that, we continued visiting the Hiroshima Atomic Bomb Museum. Many terrifying items are on display here to inform the world of the reality of the nuclear bomb, including the magnitude of its destructive power and the enormous impact of radiation damage. Here, too, the President listened to all the explanations in a serious manner.
After the tour, President Pavel left the following short message and carefully answered questions from the local media.
“In general, human beings are very weak in learning lessons from history. There is no better place than Hiroshima to realize the value of peace and the cost of war, especially nuclear war. We must continually strive to understand that there is only one Earth that we all share.”
I sincerely hope that many more Czech people will visit Hiroshima too, and learn more about the danger and calamity of the nuclear bomb.