NPB History | Old Hiroshima Municipal Stadium Site — A Ballpark Facing the Dome

The ballpark was built on a former army parade ground a short walk from the hypocentre, and it faced the Atomic Bomb Dome. That is the fact everything else about it hangs on. Twelve years after the city was destroyed, Hiroshima built a place for forty thousand people to sit together in the evening, in sight of the ruin the war had left standing. Public pressure was specifically for a ground with lights. Matsuda Tsuneji, president of Toyo Kogyo — now Mazda — took the case to the local business community, and ten companies formed the Futabakai and funded it by donation. Hiroshima Municipal Stadium was finished in July 1957 and opened on the 24th, the first ballpark in the Chugoku region with floodlights. It was the Hiroshima Toyo Carp's home for fifty-two years and 3,182 games. Sotokoba Yoshirō threw the tenth perfect game in the history of Japanese professional baseball here in 1968. In 1987 Kinugasa Sachio played his 2,131st consecutive game here and passed Lou Gehrig's world record, having missed nothing in seventeen years. It was also famously cramped, which is part of why people loved it: a small ballpark wedged into the middle of a rebuilt city, walking distance from everything, with the Dome down the road. The Carp moved east to Mazda Zoom-Zoom Stadium in 2009 — confusingly, that ground is also officially called Hiroshima Municipal Baseball Stadium, which catches out anyone searching for photographs. The old ballpark took amateur baseball for one more season, closed at the end of August 2010, and was demolished, with part of the outfield stand deliberately left standing. The site reopened on 31 March 2023 as Hiroshima Gate Park — formally the Former Hiroshima Municipal Stadium Site Event Plaza, the city's first Park-PFI project, 4.7 hectares with a 6,500-square-metre plaza at the centre and shops arranged in a C around it, echoing the shape of the stands they replaced. A promenade runs through it along the axis of peace between the cenotaph and the Dome, planted with cherry trees, and part of the paving is laid with tram setts that survived the bomb. Around 6.3 million people came in the first year, and the design won a Good Design Award in 2024. The one piece of the ballpark that was never going anywhere is Shōri no Mori, the grove where the Carp's championships are recorded in stone. It is still on the site. Go and find it, then walk the promenade north to south. The park is shaped like a ballpark on purpose, and the line you are walking was drawn between a cenotaph and a ruin before anyone thought about baseball. Coordinates 34.397420, 132.454976 — Hiroshima Gate Park, on the ballpark footprint; ±80 m, OSM map-verified, pending on-site check. Cover: Hiroshima Municipal Stadium in 2008, its second-last season, photographed by Taisyo, CC BY-SA 3.0. Second image: Hiroshima Gate Park on the same ground, photographed 26 March 2024 by Wish.F, CC BY 4.0. Both via Wikimedia Commons.