National Stadium in Shinjuku Ward — the main stadium for the 1964 Summer Olympic Games in Tokyo — will be demolished next year and a new stadium with a seating capacity of 80,000 will be built for the 2020 Summer Olympic Games, which Tokyo will host.
Just inside of what is known as Marathon Gate at the current stadium — through which the competitors in the 1964 marathon event left the track and entered the road course — stands a stone monument that testifies to one of the tragedies of World War II seven decades ago. Inscriptions on the monument dedicate it to "roughly 100,000 students who left the pen for the sword and were sent off to the battlefields."
National Stadium was built in 1958 on the former site of Meiji Jingu Gaien Stadium, where a ceremony was held Oct. 21, 1943, to send off university and higher vocational school students to the war. The moratorium on the conscription of college students was lifted for those at least 20 years old to make up for the worsening shortage of troops as Japan's war prospects increasingly deteriorated.