NPB History | Korakuen Stadium Site — The Arsenal Lot Where Tokyo Got Its Ballpark

A two-tier grandstand pushed hard up against the infield, American-style, on ground where the army had been making artillery a few years earlier. When Korakuen Stadium opened on 11 September 1937 the double deck alone was worth the trip; nobody in Japan had built one over a baseball field before.

Professional baseball got going properly in 1936, and Tokyo had nowhere to put it. Meiji Jingu Stadium was closed to the professionals by the university league that had helped pay for it, and the first game between two professional clubs in the city had to be played on a borrowed university field. Kōno Atsushi and Oshikawa Kiyoshi, the men behind Japan's first professional club, set out to build a dedicated ballpark downtown instead. Shōriki Matsutarō of the Yomiuri and Kobayashi Ichizō of Hankyu put up money, and Korakuen Stadium Co. was incorporated in December 1936.

The land was available because the army had left. The Tokyo Artillery Arsenal, in what was then Koishikawa ward, had moved its works to Kokura in Kyushu, and the vacated state land was sold off. The ballpark took its name from the Koishikawa Kōrakuen garden next door. The foul lines measured 85 metres at completion and centre field 114. Capacity later ran to 42,337, and the natural grass gave way to artificial turf in 1976.

For half a century this was the centre of the sport: home to the Giants and to the Nippon-Ham Fighters, the setting for the only game an emperor ever attended and for Oh Sadaharu's 756th home run. It closed after the 1987 season. Tokyo Dome had gone up on the adjacent site of the Korakuen velodrome and took over the job in 1988, and the old ballpark came down.

Nothing marks it. Asked where the ballpark actually stood, the company that runs Tokyo Dome City has placed the footprint as running from the plaza outside Gate 22, through Prism Hall, and on to the Tokyo Dome Hotel — the hotel standing roughly where the outfield stands were. There is no plaque, no home plate set into the paving, no line on the ground. What survives is indoors: seats and a bullpen car from the ballpark are held by the Baseball Hall of Fame Museum, a few minutes' walk around the Dome.

Stand on the Gate 22 plaza with your back to the Dome and look toward the hotel. That is the length of it.

Coordinates 35.70450, 139.75300 — the plaza between Gate 22 and Prism Hall, mid-footprint; ±80 m, OSM-verified against the operator's own description of the site, pending on-site check.

Cover photograph: Korakuen Stadium under floodlights, a full house, taken by Wakamatsu Fujio and reproduced in Sawayanagi Masayoshi's 1951 study of ballpark construction. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. It is the ballpark in its prime, not a specific game.