Best Denki Stadium

The official name — Higashi-Hirao Park Hakatanomori Football Stadium — has barely moved. Hakatanomori carried the stadium until March 2008, when the Fukuoka video game company Level-5 took the naming rights. That deal ran to February 2020, and the electronics retailer Best Denki won the competition to replace it.

The name reverted once more, and not for a sponsor. When the ground took three matches at the 2019 Rugby World Cup — Italy against Canada, France against the United States, Ireland against Samoa — tournament rules on clean stadiums stripped the branding back to Hakatanomori. The work had gone in ahead of that: goalposts of 17 metres, to rugby specification, were installed in the January.

The stadium was built for football, as the main venue of the 1995 Summer Universiade, designed by Daiken Sekkei with Fukuoka City. The Universiade final was played on it, Japan beating South Korea 2–0. Japan returned the following year for a Kirin Cup win over Mexico, 3–2, and again in 2021, when the under-24 side beat Ghana 6–0.

For the 2002 FIFA World Cup the ground served as a training venue and no more; no tournament match was staged there. Its fullest day came on 9 April 2006, when 21,545 came in for Avispa Fukuoka against Urawa Reds, and that figure still stands as the record.