The Hokkaido Ballpark, new home of the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters, stands on land once cut from Hokkaido’s forests. Long before it became a glamorous sports destination, this site was part of a wider ecosystem, home to many animals—among them the Ezo deer. Beneath the excitement of night games and brilliant floodlights lies a quieter, nearly erased history of lives displaced to make room for human leisure and economic growth.
A Place of Reminiscence is an outdoor installation that asks visitors to pause inside that blind spot. Using only stainless-steel rods and spheres, the work sketches the ghost of an Ezo deer in three dimensions. By day, the structure appears almost skeletal and diagrammatic, a faint outline caught in mid-step. At night, under the ballpark’s spotlights, the polished spheres catch and scatter light in every direction, wrapping the abstract body in a soft, flickering glow—as if the animal’s presence were hovering between disappearance and return.
Rather than condemning development outright, the piece invites viewers to imagine what it would mean to plan future projects while remembering the lives that were pushed aside. Standing beside the stadium’s bright architecture, this fragile, shimmering figure becomes a quiet counterpoint: a reminder that every new urban landmark is built on someone else’s former habitat. The work asks how we might design cities and landscapes that honor not only human spectators, but also the many nonhuman residents with whom we share this planet.
