Hiroshima Video Shows Never Before Seen Footage Of City

Never before seen video obtained by the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum shows what the city looked like before it was decimated by an atomic bomb during World War II. In the black and white footage, residents can be seen going about their daily lives, walking and biking through city streets surrounded by cherry blossoms.

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Taken by a Hiroshima resident, the video was shot about 10 years before the atomic bomb was dropped and cost about $8,000 to digitize. It is the only video owned by the museum that shows the area before 1945, according to Mashable.

Hiroshima was home to an estimated 290,000 civilians before the uranium bomb known as “Little Boy” devastated the city Aug. 6, 1945. Somewhere between 90,000 and 166,000 people were estimated to have been killed in the four-month period following the explosion, according to the Atomic Heritage Foundation.

An estimated 237,000 people were killed in Hiroshima either directly or indirectly when accounting for burns, radiation sickness and cancer, according to the United States Department of Energy. Of the 76,000 buildings in the city, 70,000 were damaged or destroyed.

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“I don’t believe anyone ever expected to look at a sight quite like that,” navigator Theodore Van Kirk recalled of the explosion, according to the Atomic Heritage Foundation. “Where we had seen a clear city two minutes before, we could now no longer see the city. We could see smoke and fires creeping up the sides of the mountains.