35 A-bomb Monument of the Hiroshima Municipal Girl's High School
Completed : August 6, 1948
Established by : Bereaved Families of Hiroshima Municipal Girl's High School
All of the 544 first and second year students and 8 teachers of Hiroshima Municipal Girl's High School who were working on building demolition in the vicinity of the south end of present Peace Memorial Park and Peace Boulevard perished. (This area, which is 500 meters from the hypocenter, was in Zaimoku-cho and Kobiki-cho at the time.) Including students mobilized at other places in the city, the school lost 679 people, the most of any school in the city.
On the back of the monument is engraved, "Rest in peace within this grassy hill. Protected by a wall of friends." The writer was Masaomi Miyakawa, who was principal at the time.
The figure of the girl engraved in the center carries a box carved with the formula for nuclear energy: E=MC2. The formula is taken from Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity, the principle behind the atomic bomb. The indirect expression was a way around the occupation army's prohibition on using the characters for "atomic bombing."
