Why you should experience Pig Park in Tokyo, Japan.
Pig Park is a cheerful children's playground where Higashigaoka's family-friendly character, animal-shaped equipment and the grand sporting landscape of Komazawa Olympic Park give younger children their own corner of Tokyo's 1964 Olympic grounds.
Set along Jiyu-dori near Komazawa-dori and just steps from the East Entrance of Komazawa Olympic Park, the playground is one of three animal-themed children's areas distributed across the grounds alongside Squirrel Park and Horse Park. Pig forms appear throughout the equipment, creating a recognizable visual character while slides, climbing structures and lower-scale play elements make the space particularly approachable for younger children. The surrounding trees and open parkland allow play to extend naturally into walking and recreation across the larger Olympic complex, whose stadiums and cycling routes remain heavily used by local families. The result is a playground where Higashigaoka's neighborhood recreation connects directly with Tokyo's Olympic inheritance, giving children a lively introduction to grounds originally designed around international competition.
What you should know about Pig Park.
Pig Park is best known for forming part of Komazawa Olympic Park, the 41-hectare sporting landscape redeveloped for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics on ground that had previously served as Tokyo Golf Club and was once considered for the canceled 1940 Games. Olympic planners selected Komazawa as the Games' second major venue cluster, with redevelopment accelerating from 1962 and producing facilities for football, wrestling, volleyball and field hockey. Yoshinobu Ashihara designed Komazawa Gymnasium and the Olympic Memorial Tower, Masachika Murata designed the athletics stadium, and both architects collaborated on the Central Plaza that organized the principal Olympic buildings into a unified composition. After competition ended, the grounds opened to the public on December 1, 1964, converting infrastructure created for a global sporting event into the metropolitan recreation landscape within which Pig Park now operates.
Komazawa's Olympic architecture gives that transformation unusual physical clarity because Ashihara conceived the 50-meter control tower as infrastructure as well as monument, incorporating a 33-ton elevated water tank, television antenna, electrical rooms, broadcast facilities and telephone exchange into the structure. The adjoining Komazawa Gymnasium hosted Olympic wrestling, while Murata's stadium staged football and survives with capacity for 20,000 spectators. Tokyo had deliberately required the complex to function after the Games as a permanent civic sports park, making its later recreational life part of the original planning logic. Pig Park extends that logic to the youngest scale, placing slides and climbing structures within a postwar complex whose architecture was conceived from the beginning to carry Olympic investment into public life.
How to fold Pig Park into your trip.
Pig Park works naturally as the lively opening to a family outing contained entirely within Komazawa Olympic Park, moving from child-scale recreation into the architecture of the 1964 Games before concluding inside the stadium that still carries the site's sporting purpose.
Begin at Olympic Memorial Tower, where Yoshinobu Ashihara combined a 50-meter visual centerpiece with water storage, broadcasting and communications infrastructure, allowing the park's most recognizable structure to introduce the ambitious architectural thinking behind the 1964 Olympic complex. Continue to Komazawa Gymnasium, also designed by Ashihara and opened in 1964, where Olympic wrestlers competed beneath an expressive roof before the building settled into its continuing role within Tokyo's metropolitan sports network. Conclude at Komazawa Olympic Park Stadium, where Olympic football was played in October 1964 and the 20,000-seat arena continues hosting football, rugby and other competition, giving the outing a living sporting finale. The progression moves from Pig Park's child-centered recreation through Ashihara's architectural centerpiece and Olympic wrestling venue into a stadium still used for competition, revealing how Komazawa translated a two-week global event into decades of neighborhood recreation.
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