AT A GLANCE
Why go?
Heiwa-no-Mori (Forest of Peace) Park is a riverside memorial in central Nagaoka that preserves the memory of the devastating 1945 air raid and sends a message of peace. Created through a citizen campaign on the raid's 50th anniversary, the park is quietly woven into the banks of the Kaki River, where award-winning landscape design meets deeply personal remembrance.↗↗
Its two most powerful features are a bronze Peace Statue containing the engraved names of child victims of the raid, and a second-generation sapling grown from the famous Aogiri tree that survived the Hiroshima atomic bombing. Each summer, the park hosts an emotional peace concert with floating lanterns drifting down the darkened river.↗↗↗
A Citizen's Answer to Tragedy
On August 1, 1945, B-29 bombers reduced roughly 80 percent of Nagaoka's city center to ash and rubble. More than 1,400 people perished, including a disproportionate number of schoolchildren. Half a century later, in 1995, a group of citizens formed the Forest of Peace Building Society with a simple aim: to keep the memory of that night alive and to send a message of peace outward from Nagaoka. Through public fundraising for tree planting and the city's own commitment, the park was completed in August 1996 along the Kaki River, threading through the heart of the modern city.
