The Aogiri of Peace Memorial Park

Four of these grew in the courtyard of the Hiroshima Telecommunications Bureau, 1,300 metres east of the hypocentre, and nothing stood between them and the flash. One burned. Three did not, and the following spring they put out buds, in a city where the working assumption was that nothing would grow for seventy years. That fact travelled further than the trees did. In 1973, when the postal bureau rebuilt, the survivors were lifted and moved into Peace Memorial Park, where two of them stand now on the north side of the museum's east building, trunks hollowed out on the side that faced the blast and closed over with new growth on the other. The third died in 1996, and one of the remaining two was blown over by a typhoon in 2004 and put back up by the city. Seeds off them are sent all over the world as second-generation aogiri; one is growing in the garden of the Truman Presidential Library, planted by Harry Truman's grandson. In 2001 a nine year old girl from a Hiroshima primary school wrote a song about the tree that won the city's millennium competition, and Hiroshima put it into the public domain so anyone could sing it. They flower yellow in June and July.