Honma 24K Gold Coin iron set, 4-Star, nine clubs

Why Japan Became Golf's Great Workshop

Japan has half of the golf courses in Asia, a trade press that treats a driver shaft as a subject worthy of a feature, and a domestic equipment market that one trade report described, in 2015, as the second largest in the world. It also has the forges, rubber works, fishing-rod factories and carbon-fibre plants whose engineers turned golf into a problem of materials. This opening chapter of The Atlas of Japanese Golf explains how that came about, and why a golfer in Texas or Tuscany now searches for clubs that were designed for a golfer in Osaka.

The courses and the boom

Golf's Japanese century was written in two halves. The first was the bubble economy of the 1980s, when the country built thousands of courses and clubs sold memberships on a scale that would be hard to imagine elsewhere. NPR reported in 2017 that about 90 per cent of Japanese courses are private, and that membership deposits in the 1980s were often $400,000 or more, refundable after a decade. After the economy collapsed in 1989, many clubs could not repay those deposits, and dozens of courses have since been bought out, redeveloped or closed.

The second half is the long adjustment. Golf had become part of business life, with settai golf, entertainment rounds with clients, as its working form. When corporate spending fell, so did the habit. NPR cited the Tokyo Shimbun for a 40 per cent drop in participation since 1996, and noted that the game carries the image of an older generation's pastime. The agronomist Micah Woods estimates that Japan once had about 2,400 golf facilities and has roughly 2,100 today, while the R&A's 2019 survey counted 2,538 eighteen-hole equivalents and 45,684 holes.

  • What it means for equipment. A smaller number of players, each of whom plays seriously and replaces clubs often, supports a market in which makers compete on fit, finish and detail rather than on price alone.
  • What it means for the pre-owned market. Clubs that were fitted, looked after and traded in at a retailer come back to the secondhand shelf in very good order. That is the supply from which our Japanese Golf rooms are drawn, and it is explained further in the buying guide.

A game with its own heroes

Masashi Ozaki, known as Jumbo, won 94 times on the Japan Golf Tour, still the all-time record, and took twelve money-list titles between 1973 and 1998. He was elected to the World Golf Hall of Fame in 2011. In April 2021 Hideki Matsuyama won the Masters, the first Japanese man to win a major championship, with a driver, irons, wedges and ball from the Srixon group in his bag. The domestic star and the global champion are the two poles between which Japanese equipment advertising has moved for decades, and Bridgestone, Srixon and Cleveland tells that part of the story.

Makers who came from other trades

The more distinctive fact about Japanese golf equipment is who makes it. Few of the major names began as golf companies. They were already expert in something else, and they brought that expertise to the club.

  • Rubber and tyres. Bridgestone's parent produced Japan's first rubber tyres in 1931 and a first golf ball for the Japanese market four years later. Yokohama Rubber launched the PRGR brand in 1983, and Sumitomo Rubber Industries owns the Srixon, Cleveland and XXIO group.
  • Fishing and racquets. Daiwa, now Globeride, is chiefly a fishing-tackle company whose golf brands are Onoff and Fourteen. Yonex moved from wooden floats for fishing nets to aluminium badminton rackets in 1969, and entered golf in 1982.
  • Carbon fibre and springs. Mitsubishi's parent set up a carbon-fibre division in 1974 and made its first carbon golf shafts in 1979. Fujikura, which began as a rubber company, has made shafts in Japan since the 1970s. Nippon Shaft is a subsidiary of NHK Spring.
  • Metalworking. Endo Manufacturing in Tsubame, Niigata, began in 1950 making small metal parts and became a forging house for other makers' golf heads, as the chapter on Epon and Endo describes. Mizuno's long-time forge, Chuo, makes precision automotive parts.

The pattern is hard to miss. Where a Western golf company often grew from a clubmaker's shop or a tour-player endorsement, the Japanese industry grew from factories that already knew how to control a material. That explains the national fondness for tolerances, weights quoted to the gram and shaft profiles described in the kind of detail usually reserved for aircraft parts. It also explains why shafts, covered in Fujikura, Graphite Design, Mitsubishi and Nippon Shaft, are a Japanese speciality in their own right.

Making things, and where

Japanese makers describe their work with the word monozukuri, the making of things, and the word carries real weight in their brand stories. The stories are not all equally firm. A fair reading of trade reporting over the past decade is that “Made in Japan” is a range, not a promise.

  • Honma says it handles every step from design to final production in-house at Sakata, yet a 2017 report found that part of its Tour World line was forged and assembled in China, with the maker saying the materials were the same.
  • Miura forges its irons in Himeji, and a 2017 profile noted that the face of its multi-material Genesis iron was made in Taiwan, with final inspection in Himeji.
  • A reviewer of Fourteen expected that its cast clubs were made in China or Taiwan, and its forged clubs possibly in Japan.

None of this makes a club worse. It makes the stamp on the hosel and the maker's own account worth reading, which is why our descriptions record both.

A home market that rewards difference

Because the domestic market is large and discerning, makers build models for it alone. Mizuno Pro is sold in Japan only, through fitting locations, and is never discounted. Miura-Giken is a label for clubs sold only in the Japanese market. PRGR’s Egg range is made up of non-conforming designs that, as one trade review noted, Japanese consumers will pay a premium for, and in February 2015 the Japan Golf Goods Association said it would support the distribution of such equipment, leaving the decision to each member. The rule book behind that decision is the subject of JDM Golf Clubs and the Rule Book.

Where to go next

In the archive now

Continue reading

After a particular set, model or finish? Our Hunting Salon™ searches across Japan's private collector circles on your behalf.

Index terms: japanese golf history · japan golf course boom · japan golf equipment market · why japanese golf clubs are different · japanese golf makers rubber fishing carbon · made in japan golf clubs · settai golf · jumbo ozaki · hideki matsuyama masters equipment

References

Dates and figures in this chapter were checked against these pages. Where accounts differ, the text says so.

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