Washingtonpost.com: Anyone Can Play

	(Brian Cronin - For The Washington Post)

The cigarette lighter costs $4,200. It is 14-karat gold, bears the Hourin Country Club logo and is offered alongside golf balls, tees and towels in the pro shop display case. The Hourin-logo gold belt buckle goes for $2,200, and the Hourin lamp is $6,600. Gold-edged Hourin dinner plates sell for $1,700 each, and a dinner setting for six goes for $41,000.

In the dining room upstairs, waiters in tuxedos silently ferry silver platters of shrimp and beef and drinks across a field of carpet as soft and rich as the loamy fairway lawn outside. Polished brown marble pillars rise 25 feet to the ceiling skylights. At either end of the room, which is half as long as a football field, eight-foot-tall bronze sculptures of half-dressed women watch over the diners: pensive and demure Cecilia by the big bay windows opening to the west, buxom Nagisa proudly brightening the maitre d's station at the entrance.

Amid the clubby elegance, Masami Kawashima savored his Chinese beef and eggplant at a table draped in crisp white linen. He sat in a marshmallow-soft leather chair and flavored his meal with a dash of salt from the sterling silver shaker on the sterling silver tray next to the fresh flowers in cut glass.

Then he pulled out a cigarette and lit it with a cheap plastic lighter. Leaning back in his chair, utterly contented, he blew a plume of smoke high into the air and grinned like an economy-class passenger on a first-class upgrade.

Kawashima, 38, runs a smoky little beer joint, the kind of place where nobody minds a burp or two among friends after a sloppy bowl of noodles late at night. He calls himself an average guy making an average living in the concrete-and-neon splotch of Tokyo's outer reaches. He never thought he'd see the inside of a place where they sell gold-plated dishes, and yet there he was, sharing the moment with his golfing buddies – his local hairdresser and his neighborhood liquor store owner.

"Hourin used to seem like something very distant to us," said Kawashima, taking another slug of his dark beer before heading out to take on the back nine. "But now that distance is gone."

It's been gone since Kawashima walked to his mailbox this spring and found a "Dear golfer" flier from Hourin. One of Japan's most exclusive clubs – a club that used to charge a membership fee of $700,000 – had sent a bulk mailing to residents of suburban Chiba Prefecture, offering them a round of golf for about $130.

Kawashima was shocked: Hourin sending out discount coupons to the masses was like the emperor throwing a Tupperware party. "I never thought I could ever play here," he said. "It was only for the rich."

But as Japan goes, so goes golf. Golf is such a metaphor for Japan's economic health that the prestigious Nihon Keizai Shimbun newspaper maintains a "golf index" tracking the price and value of country club memberships as a serious economic indicator. These days, the golf index is dropping like a pitching wedge hit fat into a hurricane head wind.

After the nation's outrageous economic "bubble" burst at the turn of the decade, land prices plummeted, real estate speculators went bust and Japan slouched into a recession that it still can't shake. At Japan's golf courses, including more than 750 new ones that sprouted up in the good times, membership prices fell through the floor. Hourin's sign-up fee is now just $34,000 – a 95 percent drop. Annual dues have dropped at the same rate, and, more important to people like Masami Kawashima, clubs like Hourin have opened their doors to nonmembers for weekday golf at bargain prices.

Through Japan's tough times, golf has emerged not less popular, but more populist. The number of Japanese playing golf has never been greater, and club memberships are on the rise. Hourin has seen its full-time memberships hold steady at about 1,100 people; they're just not the same 1,100 hotshots who came by limousine or helicopter 10 years ago. Today, the duffers hacking up Hourin's sweet fairways tend to be teachers or office workers as often as they are corporate chieftains.

"The atmosphere has become milder. There is less tension now," said Miyuki Fujii, who caddied for me at Hourin recently, wearing the club's standard plaid tunic and beekeeper-style hat (which is actually a helmet to protect against wayward golf balls).

It is hard to overstate golf's hold on the Japanese psyche, and how much time people here spend talking about it, practicing it, or even praying about it. Shoko Omi, a Buddhist monk at the Zenshoji temple northwest of Tokyo, has erected a six-foot-tall likeness of the Buddhist goddess of mercy with 13 golf clubs radiating from her head and a putter in one hand and a golf ball in the other. Golfers come to the temple by the scores to pray for monster woods, irons with a conscience and a putter filled with love.

On weekday mornings in Tokyo, it is common to see businessmen carrying a thin club bag with them to work. It seems like half the office buildings in Tokyo have a little mesh cage on the roof, where office workers spend their coffee breaks whacking practice shots into a net. Driving ranges here often look like "Hollywood Squares": cubicles stacked three stories high, perhaps 50 across, where golfers work on their swings.

As those cramped quarters attest, much of golf's allure is simply space. Homes in Japan often seem not much wider than a golf club is long. Unfilled space is so rare in Japan that golf courses are unfathomably decadent, almost excessively pleasant – like champagne served in a 10-gallon glass.

Hourin, carved out of a patch of farmland 50 miles northwest of Tokyo, cost more than $300 million to build when it opened in 1988, at the height of Japan's prosperity. Before it became a monument to changing times, it was an 18-hole display of economic braggadocio at a time when Japan felt unbeatable.

Designed by a man who built gardens at the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, it is essentially a golf course inside a Japanese garden, interwoven with contemplative rock gardens and soothing streams. A 50-foot-high waterfall roars beside the third fairway; a thousand blushing cherry trees surround No. 12 from tee to green; two hundred miniature Japanese pines are set like so many twisting dancers on the sloping approach to the 18th green.

When I arrived at Hourin for my round, Tokyo suddenly seemed more than 90 minutes away, the way the West Virginia hills seem like they couldn't possibly share a time zone with K Street. The farmland around Hourin is hilly and green and lush and clean, while grass can be a confusing and alien discovery for the children of Tokyo.

At other Japanese courses, carts carrying bags often run on magnetized underground rails and are directed by a caddie with a remote control. Some courses have escalators to move players up hills. Hourin prides itself on having nothing unnatural anywhere on its grounds, but teeing off reminded me that this is still golf Japanese-style.

Fairways at Japanese courses are generally funneled, so even the most errant shots tend to roll back toward the happy middle. At the completion of each hole, caddies – always women in Japan – bow toward the pin or the players coming next. Fujii explained that she does it to thank the gods of golf for a hole safely played.

I also may have been the only uninsured golfer on the course. By custom, golfers who score a hole-in-one must buy drinks, dinner and other costly presents for club members and friends, which can easily add up to more than $10,000. More than 4 million golfers in Japan carry "hole-in-one insurance" to cover them against the perfect tee shot.

Hourin has two teahouses where golfers can duck in for a mid-round tea or beer. The first sits in the center of a reflecting pond filled with yellow and white carp. The other is set in a quiet glade of thin bamboo. Sipping a cup of coffee there on a cool spring morning, I had a small taste of the kind of pampering Japan's elite once had all to themselves.

Another taste came in the great glass-and-marble chambers that serve as locker rooms. Private massage chairs with remote controls recline before windows that open onto yet more Japanese gardens. Just off the locker room, I joined the golfers relaxing in the black-marble elegance of a steaming, Japanese-style onsen hot bath – one of the best things ever invented in Japan.

Now all this is available to almost anyone who wants to try it. It's been a long time since anyone forked over $41,000 for a set of Hourin plates, but the management can't bring itself to replace them with a shelf full of Hourin T-shirts. Still, the middle class has come to play, and Hourin, like Japan, is learning to relish it.

On the day I played Hourin, Tomoyoshi Ogiwara and a couple of his buddies were having a lunch of Scotch and Chinese noodles and more Scotch at a table over by the grand piano.

They were part of a group of 20 landscapers who had booked Hourin for a convention. For a night in Hourin's hotel, dinner, breakfast, 18 holes of golf and use of the meeting rooms, swimming pool, hot baths, karaoke room and other comforts, each of the landscapers had paid about $185 – which, by Japanese standards, is a Motel 6 rate.

"Loan sharks and bankers, they are rich. We are not," Ogiwara explained in enthusiastic English, loud and laughing and loving life. "I have no money! No money!" he said, incredulous and delighted, as waiters in tuxedos attended to every whim of men who work in overalls.

Kevin Sullivan is co-chief of The Post's Tokyo bureau.

© Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company

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