On July 29, the Yakult Swallows will be playing the Yomiuri Giants at Azuma Stadium in Fukushima City, the closest a Japan pro baseball game will be played this season to the restricted zone around the crippled Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant No. 1. Yakult will be the home team for the encounter that had been scheduled long before the March 11 earthquake and tsunami and subsequent radiation threat.
It will mark the second trip in a little more than a month to the prefecture for the two clubs who traveled to Koriyama for a couple of games June 28-29. The Giants were the hosts for those and, having gone along for the ride, I can tell you there did not seem to be any problems concerning the fallout.
That series was originally set to be played in three cities; Koriyama on the 28th, Utsunomiya in Tochigi Prefecture on the 29th and Tokyo Dome on June 30, but Kiyohara Stadium in Utsunomiya was damaged and unusable. So the series became two games at Kaiseizan Stadium in Koriyama and one at Tokyo Dome.