FEATURE
O
n a steaming summer’s day in Tokyo’s Koto Ward, the thwack of golf balls punctuates the incessant hum of cicadas as an overheated collection of golfers smack drives into the giant green netting of a two-tiered driving range. Twenty years ago, the now-aging range would have been filled mostly with older men. Today, there are young men and women and even one or two children among the bald and graying pates. Back when golf in Japan was at the peak of its corporate hospitality-driven powers, this might have been the only place where some of these older golfers ever got to hit a ball. But the game in Japan has changed in recent years. “When I started in this business 10 years ago, the image of golf was still ‘kurai, takai and oyaji kusai [dull, expensive and unfashionable].’ It’s not that way anymore,” says Nobuya Ishizaka, CEO of Golf Digest
Online, one of Japan’s most popular golfing websites. For starters, golf has gotten cheaper. According to a 2010 survey on golfing in Japan by auditing firm KPMG, the average cost of 18 holes on a weekday is $70 for members and $110 for non-members. On weekends, those figures rise to $75 and $160, respectively. During golf’s bubble-era peak, in relative terms, players would have paid around double those prices. It wasn’t just the cost of a round that was the issue back then, however. If players weren’t members of a golf club, which cost millions of yen in joining and annual membership fees, they struggled to get anywhere near a course in the first place. “When I started my salaryman career in 1990, courses typically would allow bookings over the phone from three months prior to the date you wanted to play,” says Club Member
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