Almost everything
is permitted.
Almost nobody does it.

Most guides to conduct in Peace Memorial Park err heavily towards piety and get the facts wrong in the process. There is no published code of conduct for the park at all — which is itself worth saying — and the museum's actual rules are shorter and more permissive than the internet believes.

The useful frame is this: the written rules tell you what you will be stopped for, and there is almost nothing on that list. What governs the park is what the two hundred people around you are doing, and that is a far tighter constraint. The gap between permitted and done is the single most useful thing anyone can tell you before you arrive.

So this page gives you both columns. What you may do, from the museum's own rules. And what actually happens in the room, so that you can decide for yourself rather than find out from a stranger's expression.

This is the question people search for at 23:00 the night before, and the honest answer has two halves. There is no rule, no sign and no enforcement. And when the Chugoku Shimbun's Peace Media Center put the question to 50 people standing at the A-Bomb Dome, 70% said seeing visitors flash peace signs there made them uncomfortable while 24% saw no problem with it.

The failure mode is thoughtlessness rather than malice, and one of the people defending the practice said so himself: the Dome, in his words, is a "tourist spot", so he posed in front of it as he always does — without thinking. That is the whole thing. Nobody is accusing you of anything. They are noticing that your body did the thing it does at every other landmark, at a place where 140,000 people died.

The peace educator Seiji Horie has argued explicitly against banning it, on the grounds that forcing people not to make a peace sign would not help them think more deeply. We agree, which is why this page issues no rules. Take the photograph you want to take. Just take it having read the number.

There is no application, no registration and no fee. You fold a crane — or a thousand, or one — and you put it in one of the crane booths around the Children's Peace Monument. The city's own guidance is that anyone may offer cranes there freely.

Two things people worry about, both answerable. If you cannot come in person, you can post cranes to the city, which offers them at the monument on your behalf — you pay the postage and the city chooses the day. And offered cranes are not simply thrown away: about ten million arrive every year, roughly ten tonnes, and the city hands them on to citizens and groups who take on giving them a second life.

Cranes go in the booths, not draped on the statue. That is the only part of this with a right answer. If you are travelling with children, folding one at the hotel the night before gives them a reason to be standing there at all — see the page on visiting with children.

The Cenotaph reads, in the usual English rendering: "Let all the souls here rest in peace, for we shall not repeat the evil." In Japanese the sentence has no grammatical subject. Who "we" refers to — the Japanese, the Americans, humanity — has been argued about for seventy years, and the ambiguity is not an accident of translation.

The city's official position is that it is a pledge by all people never to repeat the error that is war, not an admission of guilt by any one nation. That reading has never satisfied everyone. In 2005 a man attacked the stone with a hammer and chisel because he objected to the word "error" — he believed it assigned blame to Japan — and the damage was severe enough that the stone had to be replaced.

Do not let a guide flatten this into a nice line about peace. The argument is part of the monument, and standing there knowing that the sentence is deliberately unowned is a different experience from standing there having read a plaque.

The City of Hiroshima's own visitor portal is branded Hiroshima Peace Tourism. That is the register to arrive in: a visit to learn and to remember, not a sight to tick off.

A useful test is often attributed to Professor Hideki Endo: that a visit to a place like this means something only if visitors "miss, grieve and pray for" the victims. Which is precisely the test a ranked listicle fails. It is also why this site does not rank or badge the museum, the park, the Dome or the Cenotaph — see the wider page on Hiroshima's unwritten rules, including the question about being American, which deserves a straight answer and gets one there.

We don't put a verdict badge on the Peace Memorial Museum, the Park, the Dome or the Cenotaph. They aren't purchases to be assessed, and ¥200 against 140,000 dead isn't a value calculation. Where a guided tour of them is worth the money we say so about the tour, not about the place.