Fukuoka Dome

The Fukuoka Dome (福岡ドーム, Fukuoka Dōmu^?) is a baseball field, located in Chūō-ku, Fukuoka, Japan. Built in 1993, the stadium can accommodate 35,695 spectators and was Japan's first stadium with a retractable roof.

The stadium serves as the headquarters of the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks. The Dome is located in Hawks Town, near Momochi Beach. It is about 15 minutes walk from Tojinmachi subway station.

The Fukuoka Dome has hosted one game in each Major League Baseball Japan All-Star Series since its creation, including the final game of the 2006 series, where Japan was swept for the first time in the history of the event.^[2]

In the TV series Extreme Engineering, Danny Forster makes a reference to the Fukuoka Dome, saying it was said to have a "floating" field. (An indoor baseball stadium in Japan which actually has a floating field is Sapporo Dome, which also hosts football games for Consadole Sapporo, a J. League club. However, this stadium does not have such a field.) In 2009, the AstroTurf field was replaced with the now more common FieldTurf, to reduce injuries for the Hawks players, who had seen far more injuries than any other team in Japan.

In the movie "Gamera: Guardian of the Universe", the stadium's retractable roof was used to trap the pterodactyl-like monsters Gyaos.

The stadium hosted Frank Sinatra's final public concerts in December 1994.

In 2005, Yahoo! Japan, one of SoftBank's subsidiaries, bought the stadium's naming rights, and thus renamed it Fukuoka Yahoo! Japan Dome (福岡Yahoo!Japanドーム, Fukuoka Yafū Japan Dōmu^?) or abbreviated as Yahoo Dome (ヤフードーム, Yafū Dōmu^?).

References

External links

• Hawkstown
• Stadium picture