Hanshin Koshien Stadium, which opened in 1924, is one of Japan’s most iconic baseball venues. Widely known as the stage for the
National High School Baseball Championship, commonly referred to as “Summer Koshien”, it has long stood as a symbol of Japanese
baseball culture.

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The lettering used on the stadium’s scoreboard was originally designed to convey essential game information, such as player names
and scores, while also shaping Koshien’s distinctive visual identity. From the 1920s through the 1980s, these characters were
handwritten individually by skilled crafsmen. While based on Mincho-style letterforms, they featured restrained horizontal
proportions and relatively thick vertical strokes, reflecting a strong emphasis on legibility. Over time, these distinctive handwritten
characteristics came to be known as “Koshien lettering.”
In 2024, marking the 100th anniversary of Hanshin Koshien Stadium as well as the centennial of Morisawa’s founding, Morisawa
undertook a joint project to analyze the defining features of Koshien lettering and carry them forward into a digital typeface.

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Morisawa examined handwritten materials preserved at the Koshien History Museum alongside existing digital data, carefully
organizing and refining the letterforms. In anticipation of use on electronic scoreboards, stroke thickness and character size were
adjusted, and legibility was verified through display tests conducted at the actual stadium.

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The completed Koshien Font is based on Mincho-style forms while emphasizing horizontal strokes, ensuring high legibility even in
electronic display environments. Numerals were designed in a Gothic style inspired by the original Koshien lettering, while hiragana
and katakana were newly developed to reflect its distinctive characteristics. The typeface includes approximately 3,000 kanji
characters and around 700 non-kanji characters, such as hiragana, katakana, and symbols, and also supports variant glyphs used in
players’ names.

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Koshien Font was released in February 2025 and is scheduled for continued use as the official scoreboard typeface at Hanshin
Koshien Stadium.