NPB History | Nagasaki Commercial School Ground — Five Years After the Bomb

The gates opened at five in the afternoon on 1 June 1950. People had begun queueing at ten in the morning. Two hours before the first pitch the ground was already past full, and the next day the local newspaper that had promoted the match gave its entire front page to a headline, an article and four photographs.

It was the first professional league game ever played in Nagasaki prefecture, and it was played five years after the bomb, on a school playing field.

The venue was the ground of the municipal Nagasaki Commercial School, whose buildings and dormitories in what is now Abugi-machi had burnt on 9 August 1945. Classes had restarted in borrowed schools and the campus was only reoccupied at the end of 1946. The field was small by professional standards — about 87 metres down the lines and 104 to centre — and it was what the city had.

The fixture was Nishinippon Pirates against Taiyō Whales. Both clubs had been founded weeks earlier when the sport split into two leagues, so neither had a history to sell; the draw was simply that the professionals were coming. The crowd got what it came for. Hirayama Kikuji of Taiyō, whose fielding at the wall in his Giants years had earned him the nickname of a magician, played the outfield; Sekiguchi Seiji of Nishinippon, later one of the pillars of the Nishitetsu Lions' golden age, hit a home run that people talked about afterwards. The noise, in a city still visibly rebuilding, was the point of the whole afternoon.

Nagasaki's connection to the professional game ran back before the war, mostly through one man. Ichioka Tadao, the Giants' first team representative and a Hall of Fame inductee in 1962, had grown up at Katsuyama Elementary in the city and brought exhibition games home whenever he could; on 8 October 1935 the Giants, newly returned from America, played the All-Mitsubishi corporate side here. The Giants also carried a catcher, Uchibori Tamotsu, out of Nagasaki Commercial itself.

The school stayed on this ground until 1986. The old buildings were then pulled down for age and the land opened up, and the Nagasaki Prefectural Gymnasium — the Kabutogani Arena — stands on it now, in the cluster of sports facilities across the railway from the Peace Park, a minute from the Ōhashi tram stop. Big N Stadium, the prefecture's main ballpark, is right there too, on the site of a different vanished ground.

Get off at Ōhashi and look at the arena. Then look across at the Peace Statue. It took five years and a schoolyard to get from one to the other.

Coordinates 32.778656, 129.854960 — Nagasaki Prefectural Gymnasium, on the school ground; ±90 m, OSM map-verified, pending on-site check.

Cover: the Nagasaki Prefectural Gymnasium, photographed 13 June 2012 by Marine-Blue, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. It shows the building on the site; nothing of the school ground survives.