In my dream, Japanese people with lesions on their faces and limbs missing from their sides limped by me in tattered clothes, staring at my blue eyes and Levis jeans as though I had personally dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. The city was gray and dusty; the gingko trees grew gnarled and twisted, the flowers dry and withered.

Few include the city of Hiroshima on their Japanese travel itinerary, opting instead for the glorious temples and neon nightlife of Tokyo, Kyoto, Nara and Osaka. This, however, is a significant mistake. Not only does Hiroshima host one of the most moving museums in the world-the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, dedicated to the first detonation of the atomic bomb-but the city is remarkably warm and down-to-earth, and particularly refreshing after the neon madness of cities like Tokyo.

I admit I was uneasy about going to Hiroshima, especially as an American. I was prepared for a weekend roaming around a ghost town, wracked with guilt. I even worried about possible health threats from remaining radiation.

But as an American, I decided that the least I could do for those who had endured the bombing was to visit Hiroshima and witness the damage myself. (Of course, having my 6-foot-3 Swedish friend along to hide behind and mask my American identity didn't hurt.)

After various hand signals and scribblings with the man selling train tickets who spoke no English beyond a "Hello," and a scramble to find a lunch in the train station, we boarded a train that we were 60 percent sure was going to Hiroshima (again, the language barrier). The bullet trains are so fast, clean and pleasant that they make going there half the fun. In keeping with Japanese efficiency, the train left the second it was scheduled for departure. The only disappointment about the train was the lack of scenery: the mountainous terrain necessitates many long, black tunnels, and the high population density allows for very little open, undeveloped landscape.

In stark contrast to my image of bitter ghosts and gray ashes, Hiroshima has risen from its tragic past to recast itself as the "International City of Peace and Culture," dedicated to the eradication of all nuclear weapons. Every Aug. 6, on the anniversary of the dropping of the bomb, the river that runs through the city sparkles with hundreds of lit paper lanterns. They float along the water in an inspiring display of hope for world peace by a people able to look beyond their suffering.

The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum spares nothing in its grisly depiction of the suffering caused by the bomb. The audio accompaniment describes in gruesome detail the children whose skin melted off as they tried to drag themselves to safety. The museum displays a huge collection of artifacts from the bombing-from charred lunchboxes to actual lesions removed from victims and preserved in jars of formaldehyde. The horror of the bomb is not simply that it killed so many people, but the grotesque, and for many, prolonged, nature of the suffering due to radiation exposure that lingered for days, years and even decades.

However, I found some of the more subtle images to be even more powerful, such as the preserved step of a building that bore the black "shadow" imprint of a woman, an imprint that was created after she was incinerated by the bomb. Outside the museum is the A-Bomb Dome, the charred, skeletal remains of a building that was near the epicenter of the blast and has been preserved with scaffolding to enable observers to imagine what the city looked like after the bombing.

Given the situations in Iraq and North Korea and the genuine threat of the use of nuclear weapons, a pilgrimage to Hiroshima holds added significance today. Some people leave the museum with no happy feelings towards the U.S., but most step out into the light so incredibly sensitized to the pain and immense suffering of others that the entire notion of war seems unfathomable.

I wonder what Osama Bin Laden would feel in Hiroshima, or whether a visit by George Bush or Donald Rumsfeld would impact their rhetoric. Would it help if the abstraction of war were dragged down onto the grisly plain of individual human suffering?

We will probably never know exactly what Truman's true motives were when he dropped the bomb, whether he wanted to display America's might to the Soviets, as some suggest, or whether he was taking advantage of an opportunity to test the bomb on a real city. But regardless, we now know the terrible destructive capabilities of nuclear weapons, and a visit to Hiroshima both sensitizes us to these perils and inspires us with the remarkable strength of the Japanese people.