Student Recreates Cityscapes before A-Bombings in Game

Tokyo, Aug. 18 (Jiji Press)--A University of Tokyo graduate student organizes workshops in which participants recreate in a game the cityscapes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki before the August 1945 U.S. atomic bombings, aiming to help people think about what the two cities lost in the nuclear attacks in the closing days of World War II.

Misaki Katayama, 27, who researches peace education, has been holding the two-day workshops in Hiroshima, western Japan, and Nagasaki, southwestern Japan, since 2023.

At the workshops, fourth- to sixth-grade elementary school students reproduce the cityscapes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki before the bombings in "Minecraft," a game that allows players to build structures and communities in a virtual world, by using maps, photographs and video footage from the time.

At a workshop held in Hiroshima on Aug. 4 and 5, 2023, students simulated the area where Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park now stands, including a temple and a kindergarten that once existed there. The park was built in 1955 near the epicenter of the bombing.

Katayama came up with the idea for the workshop six years ago when a hibakusha atomic bomb survivor told her that an elementary school student had said, "It was lucky that the atomic bomb was dropped on a park," not a densely populated area.

[Copyright The Jiji Press, Ltd.]