On this earth -- peace

“The first 10 years after the bombing was a real period of hardship,’’ Tadatoshi Akiba, the city’s mayor, said in an interview at City Hall. “People had to struggle to survive.’’

It wasn’t until the mid-1990s that planning policies were formalized. Among the goals: Hiroshima would become an “international city of peace and culture.’’ It would be environmentally friendly, giving maximum consideration to “harmonious coexistence’’ with the city’s rivers and greenery. And it would become “a city of charm and vitality.’’

It is plainly apparent that world peace is a big industry here, and not in an abstract way. The rebuilt Hiroshima may be a big (population 1.2 million) and bustling city with its Mazda headquarters, an international trade port, and a new baseball stadium for the hometown Hiroshima Toyo Carp. But the legacy of the atomic bomb is never far from people’s consciousness or even their line of vision, and it informs almost every aspect of city planning and daily life.

It’s most apparent in the thousands of “hibakusha’’ living here, the “explosion-affected people’’ who were near the hypocenter that day or were exposed to radiation from the fallout. There are more than 73,000 hibakusha in the area, whose average age is 75, and “they are in a constant state of suffering from PTSD every day,’’ said Mayor Akiba, an MIT-educated math ematician who taught at Tufts University in the 1970s and ’80s and is president of Mayors for Peace, a worldwide group dedicated to nuclear abolition. “When it comes to the suffering of the hibakusha, we are just beginning to discover what radioactivity does to those affected 60 years later.’’