I was trying to find Japanese era baseball fields when I came across areal surveillance photos taken by the Americans on April 1 1945, and June 17 1945 of the Prefecture governor building (today’s presidential palace).
April 1 1945
June 17 1945
The largest air strike against Taiwan, known as the Raid on Taipei, took place on May 31 1945. In the photo taken in June, the devastation is pretty clear. A section of the prefecture building collapsed. The area near the train station was utterly wiped out as well.
It was difficult to find evidence of Japanese era baseball fields in these areal surveillance photos, mostly because the Japanese either have converted the fields for military use, no one was maintaining the fields during war time, or the Americans bombed the crap out of these fields.
For example, Yuanshan baseball field (today’s Yuanshan Expo Dome, formerly Zhongshan football stadium) looked like this…
The field was next to IJA barracks. You can see the L shaped spectator stands still intact. The barracks had pretty much been leveled, along with the field. You could hardly tell what was there before. There were also bomb craters across the road (today’s Zhongshan North Road).
In the before photo it was obvious that at the heights of the war, the Japanese built military structures over what was once the baseball field.
Although Japanese maps showed there was a stadium at this location, no areal photos is available prior to the war, and immediately post war, the area became the base of US troops stationed in Taipei.
Maps show this was a sports facility at one point.
Photo taken in 1956, now the center piece of MAAG.
By 1965, the L shaped spectator stand was gone. Also some time prior to 1956, a baseball field popped up near this site. Before the end of the war the location of that baseball field was in the middle of rice paddies.
According to the maps at the time, the field would have been inside the American naval base.
In the past I used to think the place remained a sports facility after the war, but I was wrong. The place became the MAAG base, and they only reconverted for a sports facility in 1989.