NPB History | Tokyo Dome — The Roof That Beat the April Snow

On 8 April 1988 it snowed across the Kantō plain, which does not usually happen in April. The season opener at Seibu's ballpark was called off. The two games at Tokyo Dome went ahead exactly as scheduled, and the argument for building the thing was settled in its first week.

The Dome stands on the site of the Korakuen velodrome, which had run keirin from November 1949 and was suspended in March 1972 when the governor of Tokyo, Minobe Ryōkichi, moved to end publicly run gambling. The land spent the years after that as a summer swimming pool and an off-season golf range, sitting next door to a ballpark that was wearing out.

Japan's first domed stadium was dedicated on 11 March 1988, opened with a ceremony on 17 March, and staged its first event on the 18th: an exhibition game between the Giants and the Tigers, which doubled as the retirement ceremony for Egawa Suguru, who had thrown his last pitch the previous autumn. A new building and a closed career on the same afternoon.

The first competitive games came on 8 April, in the snow — Giants against Yakult in the afternoon, Nippon-Ham against Lotte at night, an unusual double bill because both clubs called the Dome home. Neither home side won. The first home run hit inside the Dome came in the top of the second, from Yakult's new import Doug DeCinces off Kuwata Masumi.

The place inherited more than a schedule. In 1998, marking ten years, Gate 1 was renamed the Oh Gate and Gate 3 the Nagashima Gate — numbers carried over from the shirts the two of them wore at Korakuen, where they had homered in the same game for the first time in 1959. Two years later they managed against each other in the Japan Series, in this building, wearing those numbers again.

The roof is held up by air pressure, which is why the doors sigh at you when you leave, and the whole complex — hotel, amusement park, ferris wheel — grew around it. What the Dome replaced is gone without a trace under the plaza outside; what remains of it is in the Baseball Hall of Fame Museum beside Gate 21, which is the one part of Tokyo Dome you can visit on a day with no game.

Coordinates 35.705571, 139.751970 — the stadium itself; ±20 m, OSM map-verified, pending on-site check.

Cover: Tokyo Dome, photographed 2 April 2019 by 江戸村のとくぞう, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.