Why you should experience Komazawa Olympic Park in Tokyo, Japan.
Komazawa Olympic Park is an expansive athletic precinct where Komazawa Koen's broad lawns, mature tree cover and open plazas surround a concentration of sporting architecture built at metropolitan scale.
Set along Komazawa-dori near Jiyu-dori and just steps from Komazawa-daigaku Station, the park unfolds through long pedestrian routes linking playing fields, paved plazas and imposing competition buildings across more than 400,000 square meters. A broad stairway rises toward the central plaza, where the slender control tower provides a vertical counterpoint to the low athletic structures arranged around it. Running and cycling routes extend the encounter into quieter wooded sections, creating pronounced changes between formal sporting grounds and recreational parkland. The result is a vast public landscape whose architectural scale and spatial openness preserve the physical ambition associated with Tokyo's emergence as a global sporting capital.
What you should know about Komazawa Olympic Park.
Komazawa Olympic Park is best known for becoming the second principal competition center of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics after more than a decade of sporting development transformed the site into a coordinated complex of stadiums, courts and public open space. Construction of two handball courts and a hockey field began its modern athletic history for the Fourth National Sports Festival in October 1949, followed by a sub-track in 1953 and a baseball stadium later that year. The Third Asian Games brought a new volleyball court in May 1958, and an archery ground followed for the Fourteenth National Sports Festival in October 1959. Selection of Tokyo for the Eighteenth Olympic Games triggered comprehensive redevelopment of the grounds as the Games' second competition center, with the archery facility surviving as six new principal competition facilities arose around it. Architect Masachika Murata designed the athletics stadium, and Yoshinobu Ashihara received the gymnasium commission in July 1961 before joining Murata in planning the central plaza. Ashihara developed the gymnasium around four hyperbolic paraboloid roof shells and lowered portions of the building into the ground, reducing its apparent height from the plaza. The athletics stadium hosted Olympic football, the gymnasium received wrestling, the indoor ball-game hall staged volleyball and three fields accommodated hockey during the October 1964 Games. Tokyo opened the grounds as a metropolitan park on December 1, 1964, establishing a 413,573-square-meter public landscape around facilities created for the Olympic competition program.
Yoshinobu Ashihara's control tower concentrated the engineering demands of the Olympic complex into the strongest vertical element of the central plaza. Tokyo's planning bureau required a centralized facility for electricity, communications and competition management, leading Ashihara to place electrical equipment, machinery, broadcasting functions and a telephone exchange below ground. A 33-ton elevated water tank occupied the upper structure, television broadcasting equipment required an antenna and an internal elevator supported circulation through a tower that reached 50 meters at completion. Ashihara rejected a purely sculptural solution during development and derived the built form from structural posts, beams, floor divisions, the water tank and elevator shaft. Kajima Corporation constructed the gymnasium, and Fujita-gumi constructed the tower, both reaching completion in 1964. DOCOMOMO Japan selected the gymnasium and control tower in 2005, recognizing Ashihara's application of his theories of exterior space across the buildings and central plaza. Post-Olympic development added two softball fields in 1965, a swimming facility donated by the Japanese Olympic Committee in 1966, a cycling course in 1970 and a new baseball field that August. The complex later hosted volleyball during the 1967 Tokyo Universiade, and the Tokyo Olympic Memorial Gallery joined the rebuilt gymnasium in 1993, preserving the sporting history of a precinct that continued evolving long after the 1964 Games.
How to fold Komazawa Olympic Park into your trip.
Komazawa Olympic Park works as the anchor for a daytime progression through private collecting, manga history and postwar museum architecture across southwestern Setagaya.
Begin at Gotoh Museum, created around the Japanese and East Asian art assembled by Tokyu founder Keita Gotoh, whose acquisitions included the Illustrated Handscroll of The Tale of Genji from businessman Nisaburo Takanashi and ancient mirrors collected by lawyer Kozo Moriya. Gotoh died shortly before the museum debuted in 1960, leaving a collection spanning painting, calligraphy, ceramics, tea utensils, swords and archaeological objects. Isoya Yoshida designed the main building with architectural references to shinden-zukuri, and the project received the second Building Contractors Society Award in 1961. Continue to Hasegawa Machiko Art Museum, created from the collection manga artist Machiko Hasegawa and her sister Mariko began assembling around the mid-1950s with earnings from works including Sazae-san and Ijiwaru Baasan. Hasegawa opened the institution as Hasegawa Art Museum on November 3, 1985, and its collection eventually reached 788 works comprising 311 Japanese paintings, 250 Western-style paintings, 195 craft objects and 32 sculptures. Her death in 1992 brought the present name, extending the institution beyond its founder's manga career into the preservation of the sisters' private art collection. Conclude at Setagaya Art Museum, opened on March 30, 1986 inside Kinuta Park in a building by architect Shozo Uchii. Uchii conceived the museum around relationships between art, public life and parkland, distributing windows and multiple points of entry through an architecture designed to connect exhibition spaces with the surrounding greenery. The progression moves from Keita Gotoh's assembly of Japanese and East Asian art through Machiko and Mariko Hasegawa's privately formed collection into Shozo Uchii's purpose-built museum in Kinuta Park, joining three distinct approaches to collecting, preservation and cultural architecture across Setagaya.
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