NPB History | Tokyo Stadium Site — The Stadium of Light, Gone in Eleven Years

In the aerial photograph from 1963 it looks like something that fell out of the sky. A single enormous oval of grandstand dropped into a grid of low wooden houses in Minami-Senju, with the roofs running right up to its walls. Tokyo had no towers yet. This was the tallest thing for a long way, and at night the floodlights over it turned the whole neighbourhood pale, which is why people called it the stadium of light. Tokyo Stadium was one man's argument. Nagata Masaichi ran the film studio Daiei and owned the Daimai Orions, and his club shared Korakuen with the Giants and Kokutetsu, which meant a permanently jammed schedule and permanent second billing. His reasoning was blunt: Korakuen belonged to the Central League, and until the Pacific League had its own ground in the middle of Tokyo it would always be trailing. So he built one, on the site of a closed textile mill, and paid for most of it himself. NPB puts the cost at three billion yen. He modelled it on Candlestick Park in San Francisco. It opened in 1962 as the only ballpark in Japan with natural grass across both the infield and the outfield, holding around thirty thousand, with a bowling alley under the stands and an outdoor ice rink laid on the field in winter. The outfield had almost no bulge, so home runs came in quantity. In 1970, by then the Lotte Orions, they won the Pacific League, and Nagata was thrown into the air on his own grass by his own players. Two years later it was finished. The film business was collapsing under him, and he let go of both the club and the ballpark. Tokyo Stadium closed in 1972 after eleven working years and was demolished in 1977. The Orions spent five seasons with no home at all before settling at Kawasaki, and eventually became the Chiba Lotte Marines. The most expensive private gesture in the history of Japanese baseball lasted about as long as a career. The Arakawa General Sports Centre stands on the ground now, with a pool where Kitajima Kosuke swam as a boy and two rubber-ball diamonds where people still play. From those diamonds you can see the Skytree, which is the sort of thing Nagata was trying to build. Go inside and look beside the reception desk. There are signed baseballs there — Dobashi Masayuki, Yamauchi Kazuhiro, Arito Michiyo — sitting in a municipal lobby, which is all that is left indoors of the ballpark this suburb once had. Coordinates 35.735848, 139.791278 — Arakawa General Sports Centre, on the ballpark site; ±70 m, OSM map-verified, pending on-site check. Cover: an aerial photograph of Tokyo Stadium in 1963, by the Geospatial Information Authority of Japan, CC BY 4.0. Second image: the same ground from the air in 2019, same source and licence. Both via Wikimedia Commons.