NPB History | Kamiigusa Stadium Site — Tokyo's First Ballpark Built for Professionals

The main gate carried four letters: T.B.B.A. They stood for the Tokyo Baseball Association, the body that ran the Tokyo Senators, and they were on the gate because the ballpark belonged to the club — which is the whole point of this place. When it opened in August 1936, Kamiigusa was the first ground in Tokyo built specifically for professional baseball. The professionals had nowhere to go. Meiji Jingu was closed to them by the university league. The old Seibu Railway — a different company from today's Seibu, running what is now the Shinjuku line — was one of the investors in the Tokyo Baseball Association, and the arithmetic was obvious to both sides: the club wanted a home, the railway wanted passengers riding out to Suginami. So the railway built one, and called it Tokyo Stadium. It worked briefly and very well. Twenty-one games in 1936, the first year of professional baseball in Japan, and fifty-six in 1937, when it stood alongside Waseda's Totsuka ground and the Daitokyo club's Susaki as the places the professionals played in the capital. Then Korakuen opened in September 1937 with its double deck and its downtown location, and the traffic drained away: six games in 1938. Eighty-three professional games here before the war, almost all of them Senators. Its second life was better than its first. The ground was back in use quickly after the war, and with Jingu requisitioned by the occupation from 1946 to 1952, the Tokyo Big Six restarted its league here in 1946 — the university men playing on the professionals' ballpark, the exact reverse of 1936. The 1949 national sports festival brought an expansion of the infield stands. A pine tree stood over the first-base side, which everyone who wrote about the place mentioned. Then it simply stopped. There was a plan to put an archery range here for the 1964 Olympics, abandoned when archery was dropped from the programme. The site became a water reservoir, and sports facilities were laid out on top of it: a metropolitan sports ground with four diamonds, tennis courts and a pool from 1967, handed to Suginami ward in 1979, and rebuilt in 1998 as the Kamiigusa Sports Centre that stands there now. Sources differ on exactly when the ballpark itself came down, somewhere around the turn of the 1960s. There is no plaque. A journalist who has walked the sites of Susaki, Tokyo Stadium and the old Meguro racecourse and found something at each of them came here and found nothing at all — just a quiet residential street, Waseda's ground next door, and the Seibu Shinjuku line running past. Come out of the south exit at Kamiigusa station and walk three minutes southwest. The first ballpark the professionals in Tokyo could call theirs is under the pitches, and under a reservoir. Coordinates 35.723013, 139.601603 — Kamiigusa Sports Centre, on the ballpark site; ±70 m, OSM map-verified, pending on-site check. Cover: Kamiigusa Sports Centre, Suginami, photographed 2009 by Kamemaru2000, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. It shows the facility on the site; nothing of the ballpark survives.