Ninoshima () is an island in the

Seto Inland Sea The , sometimes shortened to the Inland Sea, is the body of water separating Honshū, Shikoku, and Kyūshū, three of the four main islands of Japan. It serves as a waterway connecting the Pacific Ocean to the Sea of Japan. It connects to Osaka ...

, located near

Hiroshima is the capital of Hiroshima Prefecture in Japan. , the city had an estimated population of 1,199,391. The gross domestic product (GDP) in Greater Hiroshima, Hiroshima Urban Employment Area, was US$61.3 billion as of 2010. Kazumi Matsui h ...

. Gakuen-mae pier on Ninoshima is located 4 km from Hiroshima (Ujina) Port. It takes only half an hour to get to Ninoshima from wharf 4 of Hiroshima Port (Ujina Port) by ferry. The island is 3.87 km² in size, and topped with the mountain Aki-no-Kofuji (278 m). In Japanese, the mountain's name means "Little Fuji of Aki" (the former name of the Hiroshima area). The name of the island means "resemblance island", as the shape of the island and its mountain resemble

Mount Fuji , or Fugaku, located on the island of Honshū, is the highest mountain in Japan, with a summit elevation of . It is the second-highest volcano located on an island in Asia (after Mount Kerinci on the island of Sumatra), and seventh-highest p ...

History

Military facilities were established in Ninoshima in the 19th century. During the

First Sino-Japanese War The First Sino-Japanese War (25 July 1894 – 17 April 1895) was a conflict between China and Japan primarily over influence in Korea. After more than six months of unbroken successes by Japanese land and naval forces and the loss of the po ...

, Ninoshima served as a quarantine station. During

World War I World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...

internment camp Internment is the imprisonment of people, commonly in large groups, without charges or intent to file charges. The term is especially used for the confinement "of enemy citizens in wartime or of terrorism suspects". Thus, while it can simply ...

s were located on Ninoshima to house German

prisoners of war A prisoner of war (POW) is a person who is held Captivity, captive by a belligerent power during or immediately after an armed conflict. The earliest recorded usage of the phrase "prisoner of war" dates back to 1610. Belligerents hold priso ...

World War II

During the

Second World War World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

the island served as a quarantine centre for the

Imperial Japanese Army The was the official ground-based armed force of the Empire of Japan from 1868 to 1945. It was controlled by the Imperial Japanese Army General Staff Office and the Ministry of the Army, both of which were nominally subordinate to the Emperor o ...

and Navy. On Ninoshima was built a dock, arsenal, facilities for the study of infectious diseases contracted by service personnel overseas, and a horse quarantine station. Training facilities for the 10th Training Unit of the Army Marine Training Division were also located on Ninoshima, as well as a fuel depot. Nine kilometres from central Hiroshima, when the

atom bomb A nuclear weapon is an explosive device that derives its destructive force from nuclear reactions, either fission (fission bomb) or a combination of fission and fusion reactions (thermonuclear bomb), producing a nuclear explosion. Both bomb ...

was dropped on

on 6 August 1945, the island was unscathed by the initial blast. Therefore, for the following three weeks the island became the destination of victims of the atomic bombing. In those weeks about 10,000 people were shipped to the island, to an emergency field hospital set-up there temporarily. The emergency field hospital operated from August 6 to August 25. Most of these were never to leave the island alive as thousands perished. The Hiroshima City War Victims Ninoshima Tower was erected on the island in 1947.

Post-war

Ninoshima housed an

orphanage An orphanage is a Residential education, residential institution, total institution or group home, devoted to the Childcare, care of orphans and children who, for various reasons, cannot be cared for by their biological families. The parent ...

, set up in September 1946, for war orphans. After the war, the quarantine station continued to operate until 1958, when it was converted into the Fourth Municipal Junior High School, now the Ninoshima Elementary School and Ninoshima Junior High School. In 1971, a mass grave containing 571 victims’ skeletons was found on the grounds of Ninoshima Junior High School. All the remains found were transferred to the Atomic Bomb Memorial Mound at

Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park is a memorial park in the center of Hiroshima, Japan. It is dedicated to the legacy of Hiroshima as the first city in the world to suffer a Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nuclear attack at the end of World War II, and to the memorie ...

.Ninoshima of the Sleeping Dead
Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum More remains were exhumed in 2004.

Present day

As of 2006, the population of the island is 1,168, including 662 households.http://www.ninoshima-e.edu.city.hiroshima.jp/ (ja) In addition to the schools, Ninoshima has a ward office, post office, and environmental office.

References

{{reflist

External links

NHK Peace Archives Islands of Hiroshima Prefecture Geiyo Islands