What to Know About Golf in Japan (ft. Michael Wolf)

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at bdradty dot com. Using this code is a great way to support our podcast and a great way to get a good deal on some clothing you'll love, all right. So Olympic golf got off to a pretty great start last week in Japan at Kasumigaseki Country Club with Xanderschoffle bringing home gold for the USA, And as I was watching, I just found myself wanting to know more about Japanese

golf in general. You know. I knew that golf was very popular there and that the country has produced a ton of great players, including this year's Master's champion Hideki Matsuyama. And I knew there were some wonderful courses, including several highly ranked ones designed by Charles Hugh Allison in the nineteen thirties. But to be honest, I didn't know much more. So I decided to call up Michael Wolfe, who is a golf architecture in golf history nut. If you're on Twitter,

you know him as Bama Bearcat. Great follow posts, a bunch of interesting vintage photos and things like that, and he has a massive enthusiasm for golf in Japan. He's traveled there a couple of times, played a bunch of courses, and has done a lot of research into the history of those courses. So I thought it just would be fun to pick his brain about the subject. Now, I want to be clear, and Michael wants to be clear

that he is not from Japan. He's an American, and so we're not trying to offer an inside view of Japanese golf culture. This is very much from a Western visitor's perspective and an appreciator's perspective. This is not an authoritative account. This is just from Michael's point of view. Wanted to be super clear about that. So with that said, here is Michael Wolf on golf in Japan.

of hitting the ball in the hole. You know, the whether it's how you arrive at the golf course, or the customs on the golf course, or the food you're eating while you're playing golf or whatever, it is, everything being so different hitting that ball in the hole, That's what I really enjoyed about it.

consistent from club to club. So you're arriving in a sport coat more often than not, you're arriving by train or at least you're taking a taxi from the nearest

train station. When you check in, they give you a kind of a leather wallet that has a little key inside and has a number, and you use that number, and you use that key for instance, for your locker or for if you're going to buy something, and the if you need to buy something or you're gonna get some food or something, you just kind of show them that number and then you pay when you check out

at the end of the day. And that's true whether it's a private club or it's a public of course, the driving ranges are really just kind of for warming up. It's funny the even like the balls on the driving range are the balls are given to you almost like in egg cartons. They're like individual little slots for the balls. There's not like pyramids of balls or something you ask

for balls. They give you like a little container that holds the balls and you have to like pick the balls out of the little plastic container one by one. But even to then you know teeing off and playing. So it's mostly walking at the top clubs for sure,

everybody walks. It's caddies, it's older female caddies. The ladies will either drive a kind of a motorized push cart type thing where they almost like ride in the back of the push cart almost like almost like a dog sled or something, or they're actually physically pushing a cart that's got four bags on it and they are doing yardages.

They're filling in divots, you know, for people, and they're keeping up with everybody, and they kind of go down the middle of the middle of the fairway and you kind of walk back and forth to them to get the clubs and things like that. They don't give you any advice as far as how to play shots. They don't read greens and things like that. It's more just the nuts and bolts of you know, keeping your clubs in order and handing you the stuff back and forth

and things like that. Pace of play. I think at least the places I've been gets a bad rap. So golf is definitely an all day experience in Japan. But it's that's more because they send golfers off of both the front nine and the back nine in the morning, and then most people take a break for lunch, and then you have a separate tea time for your second nine holes, so you'll play nine holes, maybe a ta off at eight o'clock or nine o'clock in the morning.

You'll play in two hours, and it's it's normal pace of play like all of us, you know, experience of four a round of golf. But you play the back nine and the front nine and two hours and then you take a break for lunch for an hour or two hours however long you've you've made arrangements for it to take a break for and then you have a

tea time to play the back nine. So you've got to be out back out to the tenth tee or the first tee for your second nine of the day, and then you play your second nine holes in two hours. And so it can take anywhere from five to six hours if you stop for lunch. If you want to go straight through and play in four hours, you can and people do that. Which can't do is play golf in the afternoon, which is hard to believe, I think for Americans. But so you either play you know, the

front of the back and then they switch. But that's it. There is no second wave of golfers that goes out post you know, post lunch or in the afternoon. I had to beg my way onto the Olympic golf course Kasumigaseki. I had played Tokyo Golf that morning, which is directly

across the street. They share a property line, and I went out on Kasumigaseki at three o'clock in the afternoon, and I'm not exandering to say, I was the only person on all thirty six sols of their golf course, and the the maintenance crew was looking at me like, who is this person and why is he playing golf at three o'clock in the after And there's there's no such thing as sunset rounds. I believe it was explained

to me. A lot of that just has to do with where the golf courses are located, and the fact that not just the golfers have to catch the train to get back into town and and make that you know, commute by a train, but also the employees. It's it's I guess an equivalent the United States for a top club would be seminal, you know, has a has a everybody has to be off their property by five pm or whatever. And most of the top Japanese clubs that

I was at, it's the same thing. When you're done there's maybe a post round drink or two and settling up any wagers. But then you got to be on the road, either to just because you've got to catch the train to get back to where you're coming from, or just because they you know, they want to be able to let their employees go home.

kind of charming. I mean, I, you know, you when I traveled around the world for golf, I don't understand people who want to go someplace and have the golf course, whether it's a public course where it's perfectly acceptable to play t shirts and and you know, drink beer while you're on the golf course, or if it's a very formal place like like Mierfield in Scotland or whatever. When I go to places, I want to do what they do. I don't want to try to get them to allow

me to do what I usually do back home. I want to do whatever they're doing. So if I'm for sure in Scotland, I want to play golf in two and a half hours and play alternate shot. And if I'm in Japan, I don't have any problem at all with their dress codes. So it is very formal. I

would say in general, they're very neat people. You know, it's a very well dressed but also kind of well tailored, and you see that around, whether it's you know, in downtown Tokyo, whether it's watching people coming in and out of the train stations or whatever. I mean, it's a place where your shoes are polished and your you know, your shirts are ironed, and it's I don't think it's

they're doing that because it's a rule. I think they're doing it because that's what everyone does, and that's just that's how it handles. And it's that just carries over to golf. You know, people are dressed very neatly. The one that I would say definitely does stand out though, is that they at the top clubs, it is a very kind of old school dress too. It's a lot

of navies and grays and khakis. It is discouraged in some place, is actually not allowed to wear loud colors, and in particular, I think the color red in some places is not considered a good choice, of an appropriate choice. And again it's just I think it's kind of in keeping with everything else. You know, they they're speaking in lower tones, and they're you know, they're.

tour professional players, that doesn't seem to match. But it's a you know, it's a different kind of that's a different situation that they're in where they're advertising and they're and they're trying to get attention versus at least, like I said, these private clubs where they're very comfortable with the rules that they have and the way they do things.

You you not just the not just the clothes, but but really whether it's all all of the customs of playing golf at these places, you definitely you can tell you get the sense that they were doing it the exact same way fifty years ago and that they're going to be doing it the exact same way fifty years from now. And I like that. I like that part. That's what I wanted to go see.

than the United States. And you know, on top of that, you have you have the driving the double decker driving ranges, and just kind of all the ways that they've adapted to their love of golf, even though it's one of the hardest places to play golf, or at least it has been for in the past. With you know, just the way their major cities are built up and their transportation hubs and things like that, it's it's very difficult for most people to actually get to a golf course

and be able to play eighteen holes of golf. So they've found other ways to do it. But yeah, golf on television. I mean, I was mentioning the the ladies that caddy at a lot of the top clubs, they're all back in the caddyshack watching golf, gambling on golf. They're all in fantasy golf leagues. They get it, and they're they're into it right.

in the United States. Just like in the United States, you know where there was you know, people put it in and you know, or two later, a couple changes of ownership, and now the people that are running it now are maybe a little bit more willing to take players at least during the weekdays, maybe not on the weekends or at prime times, just like in the United States. But yes, and more online bookings too. There are more places now where you can book actually a tea time online.

Now the quality of that golf course or how easy it is to get to those places, you know, there's a reason maybe they're willing to let anybody play off there, but it's just best definitely changed. One other one that I definitely have to mention is their whole idea of park golf. So they do have lots of park golf courses and so park golf for those that don't know where. There's a couple of different names for it, but it

started on. If you think of most I think Americans think of Japan as one island, but it's actually there's one main island and then there's a lot of other lines, but the island to the biggest island to the north of the main island, it started up there. So park golf it's it's essentially a it's nine holes and it's in a public park. Usually there's three or four different nine hole loops that you can play, but you play nine holes is kind of the standard, so depending on

which routing you're gonna pick. And then you play with one ball that's like a whiffle ball, maybe like a solid whooketball. It's like a plastic plastic key ball, and it's big. It's much bigger than the regular golf ball, maybe like our size of a racquetball, but it's also a solid it's a solid ball. It's like a solid plastic ball. And you play with a mallet that would

be like a driver head. It's like the size of a driver head, and it's probably i don't know, like twelve degrees or fourteen degrees, and so you can't really get the ball very airborne. And the holes are maybe anywhere from like one hundred yards to down to like thirty yards, and there's a bunker or two sometimes and

you kind of got a player way around them. So it's a little bit of a mix between like a par three course and like croquet, and you play, you know, fast, it's a social game and you're playing, but you know, you keep score and they have leagues and things like that, and you can borrow clubs and balls or you can rent them right there. So it's again kind of a little bit more than put putt, not quite a full

part recourse. And it used to be that it was just old people that old people did it, and they kind of were out in the park and rather than

going for a walk because they love golf. You know, somebody came up with the idea of let's, you know, let's play golf in the park, and they viewed they've gone with the single club in the in this ball so that nobody gets killed because you're the holes are really close to each other, like you got to pay attention, and that's I guess part of it is like head on a swivel type thing and being aware of the

folks around you. I don't know whether this would work in downtown Chicago, but it fits well enough with the Japanese and particularly in the outlying area, so that helps.

the post war baby boom. But it's it's falling dramatically in the birth rates would suggest it's going to continue to fall dramatically, and they're saying, you know, within thirty years it's going to be under one hundred million people, so they're going to lose thirty percent of their population. On top of that, like in China, like in a lot of places, a lot of their young people are

moving to the major cities, in particularly Tokyo. So you've got a situation where Tokyo is growing and everywhere else in the country is losing thirty or forty or fifty percent of their population. And so as it pertains to golf, I don't know that golf is going to get much cheaper or easier to access around Tokyo, which is, you know,

a third of their whole population. But in the outlying areas, I think it's it's getting much easier to play golf in the outlying areas and in much easier to access and cheaper.

member who's willing to host you. Those members of those clubs are very proud of their clubs and they're very happy to share the show them off to people they know, where people they kind of trust as their guests, and because it's kind of a tight type knit community, and they know that if you're traveling all the way over there to play one of the courses, you're probably also

interested in seeing some of the others. If you can kind of get your foot in the door at one club with one member to host you, it's not unusual to receive an offer for them to also offer to arrange for you to visit other clubs and see those golf courses while you're there. They know that if you're traveling that far, you'd probably want to do that. And

it's a pretty well defined set of top clubs. There are six or seven golf courses in Japan that are acknowledged by everyone as the top six or seven, and there's not a whole lot of dispute about it. The members of those clubs also tend to be members of more than one club, and it's a pretty tight knit circle. And so you if you can get your foot in the door now, it's hard to do from practical standpoint.

So once you get in and you've got an invitation to play one and maybe you've been able to grow that into play in three or four places, you're gonna

want to buy train tickets ahead of time. So the using the train system in Japan would be expensive to do on a ticket by ticket basis or a trip by trip basis, But to help with tourism, you can arrange ahead of time, so you can go online and book a ticket for I think you buy seven day ticket or fourteen day ticket and it has to be mailed to an address outside of Japan, and it has your name on it and everything, but it's at a huge discount. So for a couple of one hundred dollars

you can get up. You can get a pass it a last year for two weeks, and you can go wherever you want on any of the train lines. Once you do that, then on the train lines you can either book your train tickets ahead of time and it's pretty easy to do online, or you can just walk up and as long as there's an extra seat on

the train, you can you can go anywhere. And it works for all the subways, and I think it even works for like the ferries and things like that to out to some of the outer islands if you want to do some sighting with that. So you got to get your train ticket ahead of time, and then Tokyo you're probably gonna be in Tokyo, either coming or going. They actually offer a free translator for a day so

you can. They have a service where the ones that I've been hooked up with tend to be I think it's like retired people who a lot of them used to travel internationally, I guess for business or for some

reason or another. They've they've learned to speak English and they want to stay sharp with it, so they want to like practice, and so they'll walk around with you for the day and it's like a matchmaking so you again there's if you google online, the service, it's they you fill out a little for them, and you tell them which day you're looking at, and you tell them

what your interests are. And if you say, I'm interested in golf, or I'm interested in shopping for address, or I'm interested in learning more about, you know, some part of Japanese culture, they'll match you with someone who has some expertise in that or has some interest in that, and then they give you the contact information and you email the person back and forth and they kind of act as a little you know, they help you with a little travel advice before you even get there, and

then you meet at an assigned time and place and they give you six or you know, four or six hours of walking around in my case in Tokyo with me and it works out great. So you get your translator, you get your you get your train tickets. The other big one which takes thought and it takes you know, you got to be a little bit adventurous when you go to your band to do this. So you're not allowed to take golf clubs and you're not allowed to take luggage on the train. There's just no room for it.

And it's and it's just not you know, you just don't do that. And so the way they get around that is they have this luggage transportation system. It's called the Black Cat. And the and the reason it's called the black Cat transportation it's like FedEx or EPs. If you're a little Ustaism fan. It's I can't believe they don't they don't. Uh, I'm just waiting for for a black Cat to start sponsoring a third warring family and the tour sponsorship wars. But the black Cat they call

the black Cat. It's it's a yellow circle with a black cat and is their logo in the middle. And they're everywhere. They're at it. They have a little desk at every like hotel lobby on the corner of every street,

and certainly in the airport there's a massive operation. And so the way it works is when you land, you get your luggage off the luggage carouse at the airport, and then you go over to the black cat counter and you tell them which hotel you're staying at, and you know, you say goodbye to your luggage, and you get on the train then with nothing but your wallet and and you know, your your passport stuck in your pocket, and magically, and I mean magically, the luggage appears at

your hotel. And the nice hotels they even take the luggage up and put it in your room before you get there. And then when you get to the hotel, you would want to tell them then, oh, I'm playing golf at Naruo the next day. I'm playing golf at Massou the next day, and then they would send it from the hotel to the golf course. And then you would have your luggage up in your room right and you take you know, shower, and you go to bed and in the morning you wake up and you put

your golf club clothes on. But then you'd take your luggage back down to the lobby and you tell them which hotel you're staying at the next day, and you say goodbye to your luggage again, and then you go to the golf course and you play all day, and you're sure enough your your golf clubs have made it okay to the golf course, and you play and enjoy yourself at the golf course, and then you're just hoping that when you get to the different hotel that afternoon,

you get that somehow again magically, your your luggage has made it from the first hotel to the second hotel. But it's always worked out for me. So the black cat. So you got to learn about the black cat. If you're gonna go to Japan and you plan on moving around a lot from location to location.

you know, like a winged foot type situation. Bordering Kasumigaseki is Tokyo Golf Club, and the relationship between those two would be very similar, almost to a San Francisco golf club versus an Olympic. You know, Olympic is a busy place. It's it's known by a casual fan. If you're really an architecture geek or a golf history geek. You probably would would would like a chance to play San Francisco Golf Club even before Olympic, even though more people in

the general population have heard of Olympics. So so that relationship exists. Tokyo Golf Club, like I say, they share a fence line, Tokyo Golf Club is much more private, it's much quieter. It's it's like a Marion or almost a National Golf Links of America. I would say, where it's you can trace the history of the gamer. Maybe a Chicago Golf Club would be a better comparison to Chicago Golf. We'll go with Chicago Golf because because Tokyo

Golf is not the original golf course. It's it's moved several times because of they lost their lease once and and things like that. It's it's kind of and because the changing nature of the game of off over the last one hundred years, so very similar to Chicago, where you know it started in a different Downers Grove, I guess, and then moved to to Wheaton where it is now. But yeah, so that would be Tokyo Golf. You've got Herono, the most famous course in Japan, the best course. It's

always number one of the rankings. It's always in the top, you know, fifty of the world rankings. It deserves to be. Herona would be like the Pine Valley. I would say. The members there are definitely very golfy. They are proud of their golf course. It is an extremely difficult golf course. The holes are all memorable, it's the views are spectacular,

the shot values. I mean, however you want to judge a golf course, it's there for you no matter what kind of criteria you use in determining whether you like a golf course or you think it's a good golf course. Herona would score very well. So Herono, I would say, it would be like Pine Valley.

But Narua would almost be like a sand hills or prairie dunes, not not visually, but because it's kind of off the beaten track a little bit, and it's and it's probably more of the hardcore golfers that are going to know about it, you know, you like I say, you know, if you're a golf fan or an architecture fan,

you know about prairie dunes or sand hills. But it's gonna take a little bit more effort for most people to get there than it would to play wing foot or to play Tokyo golf or something like that, at least as far as the travel and stuff like that. And again, everybody at Naruo, if you remember at naru and you're playing golf in the roads because you really like off and you're into it. The other one I

would say that I got to play. There's a golf course called Nasou, and Nasu would be equivalent to Seminole in the United States. And I say that again not because of agronomy or where it's located. It's the opposite of Seminole. It's up in the mountains. It's way up in Border is a national park a couple hours north of downtown Tokyo. And when I say at Borders National Park, I mean it's like playing golf in Kawai or something where you're overlooking just this massive valleys and mountain peaks.

It's just spectacular. And the Imperial family has their vacation home is there. And the reason I say it's like Seminol is because most of the members of the other top clubs that I just mentioned, Kasumuga, Seki or Herono or Tokyo Golf, Nasou is a place where they would like to go in the summertime when it's hot and humid.

So right now, they would get the heck out of Tokyo for a long weekend and they would go up into the mountains of Nassou where it's twenty degrees cooler and not as humid, and they would play golf up in Nassau and it's you know, even you see like the bags on the bag rail and they're all you know, they're all from famous other golf course or the bag tags in their bags. They're all from other famous clubs, and guys use it like as a second club to go up there and play, and it's it's got a

wonderful kind of culture around it. They've got their own like lodge house that's almost like a dormy house, you like a pine valley or somewhere. They've got this wonderful outdoor onsen, which is like an outdoor steamy bathtub. Theirs is a real one, as they'll point out to you.

Most of them are like just piped in water. That's like a hot tub at most clubs, but theirs is like actually bubbling up from the ground and you can smell the sulfur in it and stuff like that, and you sit outside after you're done playing, and it's it's it's pretty awesome. So yeah, those are those are the main ones. As far as new stuff, You've got Yokohama Golf Club, which is post World War two and that's

Bill Core. That was a Bill Core and it's it's kind of built in, you know, the Core Crunshaw style with the scruffy bunkers and you know kind of his his ideas on what how golf should be played and shot values and things like that, and you can kind of tell. And again it's it's almost like if you think of what in your mind a Japanese version of a Core and Crenshaw golf course, it would be like her a Bill Core golf course. And then you get there, you're like, oh, this is kind of like a is

kind of what you would think it would be. It's it's uh, you know, the trees are a little bit different. In the grass, it feels a little bit different, but but you can kind of understand that, yeah, that's the guy who built this is the same guy who built some of those places that I love back in back in America.

but it's up. It's up. You're you know, you're one hundred feet above above the water, just just like you are at Pebble Beach. You know you're not It's not a Lynx course at all. You're you're up above, but very similar agronomy to to the Monterey Peninsula kind of with the fall rolling in and out. Unfortunately, the hotel is not of the standard. It is very run down. It's I want to choose my words carefully because I was a guest at a you know, especially in a

foreign country. But I think most even most Japanese hardcore golf fans natives, would tell you that Kowana could be doing better than it is right now. It's owned by a large hotel chain. They owned several resorts, and it does not seem like in the last at least in the last decade or so, there's been much investment in the hotel or in the golf course. The bones are

all there. It's still a great place to play golf, but it's not what it could be, I guess, not what it should be, not what it should be.

But you know, to be honest, and I wasn't really sort of attentive to the architecture of the course as I was watching the tournament, but a lot of it sort of washed over me, Like it looks pristine, obviously, like it looks absolutely beautiful, and like it's brilliantly taken

care of as a golf course. But what are maybe some of the architectural details that I missed or some of the things that stand out about the golf course itself that maybe I could look for when I'm watching the women play the course.

Some thought needs to be given to it. And so the decision to with some of the changes again this is what I was told, was very much with the thought of hosting the best players in the world and and accommodating huge, what was expected to be huge crowds, and so you know, they brought in Fazzio in committed Tom Fazzio from when I was told only made one visit. It was really Logan Fazzio who made tea who made the changes, the major one of which was they had

double greens. So Kazumagaseki was one of those clubs that that that had the double greens that you know, again a lot of that's another one that's really kind of clicked.

have a couple of double uh. They don't have double greens in every hole, but they still have a few holes where they do have the second green. They're really just an afterthought. They're They're like if you've played golf in the you know, Upper Midwest or whatever. I grew up in Cincinnati, we would have winter greens and and they're just round circles kind of the.

make sense for where the other green was. But that was not Kasumigaseki. At Kasumigaseki, they had put thought into it, and the men who had been working in Kasumigaseki over the years, from what I'm told, they did a very good job in a rare version where both greens were good, and both greens had strategy, enough strategy to them where there was even some question of which set you thought was the better golf course or which one was preferred. Those were removed and so those were all gone, taken

out for the Olympics. And two, I think that work started like twenty fourteen, fifteen sixteen. I think in twenty sixteen, I think is when Kasumigaseki reopened with only one set of greens. From what I've seen on television and what you've seen on television, and from what I've seen in the pictures of what it looked like before that, it looks like they took two small greens and made it

into one big green. But some things you can look for if you're a fan of architecture is that on some sides of the greens and on some of the holes where there were bunkers, you know, in front of the greens, some of the bunkering is original and they call them Alison bunkers. They literally call them the Allisons. In the Japanese big golf fans, they'll tell you on which golf courses which bunkers are still original Alison bunkers.

The one that you know was pointed out to me and has you've been mentioned several times, the tenth hole at Kasumikoseki that you'll see next week, that the bunker in front of the tenth hole is still an original Alison. So even though there were two greens there at one time on that hole, at least when they combined it into one green, they were still able to, you know,

that bunker still did remain. From a practical standpoint, though, the greens are much much bigger than they used to be, so they're all the greens are all, you know, one big green instead of two generally speaking, smaller greens.

think the tenth hole is kind of a neat. It's interesting when you watch on television. There's I put it on my Twitter account. There's two trees on the right hand side. They're like evergreen trees that I've never seen evergreens like in the United States that grow straight up, like something maybe you'd see at the Pacific Northwest. But they're not real wide trees. They're just really tall and they've been there since the beginning. And the men they

never the men. The first day the pin was on the right hand side, but they put the t's on the far left tan side, and so they didn't really unless you were playing a big draw that you wouldn't really flirt with the trees, especially if you're a professional golfer. For me, when I played, the tree was very much in play. If the tree, if the tea's are in the middle of the of the teeing box and that pin is as far back right as it was for the first round of the Men, you you have to

cut on a part three. I mean it's a it's almost a dog leg part three. So yeah, that's that's an interesting hole for me. I mean I like six, I like seven. They're all you know, I think interesting eight, six and eight have the trees and so they those are two holes where I think it's yeah, six, six and eight. They have trees that are so they have they'll have one lone tree positioned very close to the green, and it's these trees are groomed. They're like bonds. They're

like giant bondsie trees. I mean they are the trees have numbers on them, and each tree has its own you know, file on you know when it was last trimmed and raised, the skirts on the trees and all these things and and on on on. Some of the holes of Sagaseki they still have of the trees are used like as an aerial defense, and they really they limit the playing angle of where you can approach the green from. You know, it's like a lot of places. I mean, I you know what I prefer to see

that the world gets to see herono on television. Of course, you know if France and for the next Olympics, would everybody like to see more Fontaine instead.

The lesser known players that I don't know about and I haven't heard of from the countries. I enjoy that more than I do the you know, the stars of you know.

So there's I mean, and that's probably why I wasn't paying as much attention to the golf course on the last day of the men's tournament, because there was so much to think about other than that, but it's good to have a few things to kind of key in on the as the women play the same venue. So Japanese golf history is tremendously interesting. We can't possibly do justice to it in this last segment of the podcast, but you know a lot about it. You've done some

research on it. So maybe you could tell me the story of how the first golf course got put in the ground in Japan.

the south. He was an Englishman. He had, you know, grown up playing golf with like a lot of his guys. He was bored, he missed playing golf and he went out on a sandbar in out in the harbor and was wagging the ball around like I would do if I was in a place with no golf for several years. Uh That lasted for about a year, and and him and his buddies pretty quickly decided, hey, that you know, I forgot how fun golf is. Let's let's you know,

let's do this for real. Uh So nineteen oh two nineteen oh three he moved up to h He built a golf course up on top of Mount Roku r O Kku and it is a couple thousand feet above the harbor in Kobe looks down and they formed Kobe Golf Club. So if Kobe Golf Club was the first golf course in Japan, they were the first guys. It was at the beginning, it was it was Westerners, who would you know, practice the golf other places. They built this golf course up on top of the mountain to

get away from the heat and the humidity. And also that was where the I guess they were allowed to in the land was. Kobe Golf Club is still there and it's awesome. So it is eighteen holes, it is forty one hundred yards. They will loan you a set of hickories to play it. They have restricted flight balls

and the views are just spectacular. The only thing I can compare Kobe Golf Club to would be like if you've ever been to like the Grand Canyon, and you've stood on the rim of the Grand Canyon and looked down at the Colorado River and like you see like the boats, you know, you see the boats and things moving. Or if you were ever like at the top of one of the skyscrapers in New York and you look down in New York Harbor and the boats look like

little toy boats. When you're playing Cobe Golf Club and you're looking down at the harbor, it's you're that high up in the view as that spectacular, and you play eighteen holes and it's just it's just awesome. They've got the eighteenth they found a couple of years ago when I was visiting. They had found the original rollers for sand greens they had when it opened, it had sand greens. They found the rollers and so they were in the process of building one of the sand greens back on eighteenth.

So when you play the eighteenth hole, you can either play it to the grass green or you can play it to the sand green. It's the only sand green I've ever you know, an experience with. And they've got these rollers. The clubhouse is just it's this wonderful one hundred year old place that they, you know, they the members appreciate and it's it's Park Museum and Park Golf Club and it's just it's just awesome. That was the

first one it spread. The first one with the Japanese, with the natives was Tokyo Golf Club was started not too long after that. It was nineteen fourteen is when it was founded. As you might expect, it was founded by Japanese guys who had played golf, learned to play golf in other places and then brought it back to Japan and wanted to do it. The first golf course was for Japan was actually laid out by an American. It was laid out by a guy whose name I

will Butcher Walter Farag, I think his name is. He built Lakeside in San Francisco, and he built and he built Annandale Golf Club in Pasadena. And I don't really know why he was in Japan, but but he was the one who was there and they talked in the land on the golf course. So Tokyo Golf was founded

in nineteen fourteen. The key moment in Tokyo. In Japanese golf history was the lease expired, so they when they built a golf course, they built it in a field that was they didn't know it was on leased land. The lease expired in nineteen twenty nine, and at that point they thought, well, we got to find a new golf course. And one of the members, a man named Kamio Otani, took it upon himself and said, we got

to build a new golf course. This is our opportunity to build a real golf course like they have overseas. Atani had worked in London, He had played all the Heathland courses. He knew all about Harry Colt and Swimley Forest and Saint George's Hill, and Otani was into it. He was the one who said, let's hire Harry Colt and bring him here. They hired Harry Colt. They sent Harry Colt fifteen hundred pounds. Harry Colt never showed up.

I don't know why. Nobody knows why. I mean, Harry Colt was an older guy and getting to Japan was really hard. So Harry Colt didn't go, but Charles Allison did instead. Allison was up, you know, contemporary and it was a partner of Colt's. Everybody listening to Friday probably knows, but he was involved in places like Milwaukee and Pine Valley. He was in the United States, so it's a little bit easier for him to get over there. He sailed from the West coast of the United States. He arrived

in December of nineteen thirty. He brought his wife with him, and he brought his builder with him, a gentleman named George Penglease Pnglase. That was in December nineteen thirty and in the sixty days from when Charles Allison stepped off the boat in Japan until when he left sixty days later, he changed the world of Japanese golf forever. The best comparison that I can make would be Alistair McKenzie's three

month or four months stay in Australia. It's the same kind of thing where you know, he was only there for a couple of months. And we always forget these days that most of these guys, you know, because of the travel and stuff, they never saw the golf courses that they built. They were never finished. The grass wasn't

even growing by the time they left. But what Alison did is the same thing that Mackenzie did for the Australians, which was he brought them his philosophy of how to design a course, how to raty course, the shot values, what made a good golf course a good golf course, and he and Penglaze together explained how to build a golf course. You know, the right techniques for bunker building. And when I say Alison bunkers, that's what we're really

talking about. And fortunately the men that he partnered with, you know Atani at Tokyo Golf, and there were a bunch of them different places. I won't give them all the names because I'll mispronounce him, but that these guys all had in commonweos They were all educated in other parts of the world or they had gone to work, and they knew a little bit about golf, and they were all members of Tokyo Golf. But they also had

little side projects going on. So so again, just like Mackenzie when he went to Australia, he was there to build the new Tokyo Golf Club, but once he got off the boat, almost immediately all the different members took u golf. They had all their little side side hustles going on, they all jumped all over them, and in two months he went to you know, nine different golf courses and helped build you know, Herono, and helped redesign the rule and helped redesign Kasumigaseki and you know, put

his stamp on all those golf courses. But beyond that, he also left behind these gentlemen, these five or six or seven different guys who all had learned from him, And fortunately they were all kind of young enough guys and they had seen enough other golf courses that they were able to carry it on even after he was gone, so that, you know, even after all the devastation of the war and stuff like that, men like you know, Kenya Fujeta who design Kasumigaseki and Takata who was Herono,

and they helped rebuild a lot of the golf courses that were either completely destroyed or had to move or you know, had major changes done, you know, during the war or through that, and some of the courses had even gone fallow. So unfortunately a lot of the guys at least had first hand direct connections back with Alison.

in the shape that they currently are. You know, they weren't finished when he left, but he managed to leave an impression on people like Alex Russell and Mick Morecambe and give them some of the inspiration and knowledge that they needed in order to carry out McKenzie's work and to do some of their own work. And it turned out to be ex and to set the course for Australia and golf course design until the present day. It seems like much the same thing happened in Japan with

Allison's visit. Now, I mean, as you said, most listeners to this podcast are going to be at least a little bit familiar with Harry Colt and Charles Hugh Allison. But you know, just to give it a general idea, Colt was a revolutionary architect, right. He was one of the first architects to really blend his courses into the landscape, one of the early architects to adopt the strategic philosophy of John Lowe and others and to start to apply it to the courses that he was building and rebuilding.

Alison was Colt's partner, Colt's protege, and he ended up going to Japan in colts Stead. You know, do you have a sense of Alison's style, because you know, here's the real question I'm asking you know, I've seen some Allison courses, primarily in the Midwest, and maybe it's just how they have evolved in recent years, but the greens and the bunkers are so much more kind of basic and simple at those Allison courses in America than they are in Japan, especially those some of those photos that

you've posted on Twitter of Herono and other courses. You know, looking at the bunkers and greens that were built at Allison's project sites, you know, they look a lot like Alistair McKenzie's work, that they have these kind of fascinating frilly edges and the greens or wild and it just strikes me that that work is a little bit different than the work that Allison did a lot of other places.

Would you agree with that? Is that just me looking at photos and getting the wrong impression or you know what's going on there.

or hand drawn topo map. And then he retreated to the Imperial Hotel, which is an old, frankly right beautiful hotel right next to the main railroad station there in Tokyo, and he locked himself in the room and he like did the routing in seven days and came out and like handed it to him and was like, here's your golf course. And then you know, he did kind of similar things when he rotted some of the other golf courses for these, like I said, these side projects that

these guys wanted done. So we know he was a fast router. I would say, pretty consistently good par threes. I mean it's I don't you know, I don't know whether he started the par threes or not, you know that's how he started or what his techniques were. But but one way or the other, he ended up with some pretty darn good part threes. I believe the par threes at Corona are the best in the world. I mean,

they're just spectacular. They're diverse as far as the length of them, you know that they're diverse as far as the shot required. They're they've got just like Cypress Point, the sixteen, you know, the fifteenth and the sixteen tolls at Cypress Point. You know, it's the perfect you know, like the quote, you know, it's the perfect melding of of mother nature and the golf coming together along with

Alice from McKenzie. No what he was doing Herono is the same where there's you know, the fifth hole at Herona, the seventh the Devil's did it. Three of the four are like it's the perfect carry, you know what I mean, like over the wall, you know, from the one from the teen ground to where the green sits. It's like it's the exact right distance for a middle iron or

you know, and it's like it's just fortuitous. It's like it's like if a kid was designing it in his backyard that the distance is just it just worked out perfect. Or they just like had a you know, they didn't like bring bulldozers or anything. They just it just But the fact that he was able to see those would tend to make me believe that he was probably looking for those first and then did the others kind of

around them. Yeah, so I'd say that it's the other thing is though, is again I don't think you can underestimate that these top clubs in Japan, it helps them. It helps kind of defend their out how outstanding they are. They have a built in defense, which is the kind of deferential nature of the Japanese culture when it comes

to these Alison being Alison. They respect that and they honor that and protect it, and you don't have a lot of meddling with it and Green's committees doing different things, or at least I did not observe that. So they've got something that they can kind of trace it back to in a culture that is going to respect that. Now, there's a downside of that, which is there's not a

next wave of new Japanese architects praxicing today. There's no young guys that are I mean, it's unfortunately most of the work is you know, it's all done by brand name guys from the United States or from you know, you know, Martin Eberger or kill Hanson is the architecture record for Tokyo Golf and they bring their crews over there and do the work. There's there's not a group of Japanese architects or guys over there that are you know,

make a lot of decisions. It's pretty they pretty much defer to the big kind of brand name guys.

That the population isn't getting any bigger and and the golfing population isn't getting any bigger.

The land is another issue, so that the land. We didn't talk about the land, but the land is extremely There's a reason why the you know, the the Allison's besides besides Allison and his crews, besides that, The other reason why there hasn't been a lot since then, there are a lot of great stuff since then, is the sights that he was given to work with were not allowed to be replicated. It. You know, it started in the in the build up of the war, the militarization

of the country. They wanted all the good land for crops and you know, they needed the land for war production basically. But even post war, all the all the sites for land that that you could get I guess permitted for. You would say, we're all just really crappy hilly sites that were just you know, they had a blast into hillsides and stuff like that, and the routings they're all just carpbalk golf. And it's just that's really hard to overcome some of the pictures I've seen the places.

No matter how good of an arc ticket it was, they weren't gonna be able to overcome that. But I wonder Japan was hot enough for a while with golf that and it was so as expensive that for a while it was cheaper for those guys to fly to Pebble Beach or to fly to roll in Melbourne, and if they wanted to play a great golf in public golf or places that they could actually get on that was easier for them and cheaper than them then sitting around hoping that someday they would be invited to play

you know, Horno or Tokyo golf. I wonder if there's not an in between there that that abandoned dunes type set up or cabot or whatever, you know, where a guy could go for you know, three days and play three or four really good golf courses that were all clustered together on on you know, some resort that's that's farther away from the from the main areas of Tokyo and where the population bases are. I wonder if that

is possibly a little bit more doable. A huge advantage that they have as far as the infrastructure setup is certainly that train system, and man, it's it's nice for you know, if you can imagine like just going on a three day plane or a three day train ride or a trip where you could play you know, sand hills and prairie dunes and and southern hills and in between your you're going, you know, two hundred miles an hour on a train while you're drinking a Miller light, and it's.

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