Bad times for golf in Japan

Far more than just a sport in Japan

By BBC News Online's Alexander Koliandre and Jeremy Scott-Joynt

Once upon a time, Japan was golf crazy.

Barely a week went by without a course, or one of the huge, netting-shrouded five-storey driving ranges which dominated Japanese suburban skylines, opening somewhere in the country.

And during the 1980s, when the sky was the limit for the stock market, even the soaring price of land in this most crowded country could not slow the game's remorseless invasion.

Just the opposite, in fact: laws passed specifically to stimulate the development of courses and resorts helped catalyse the land price boom.

It even triggered a thriving anti-golf movement, as environmentalists worried about the degradation caused by both the creation of courses by levelling huge slabs of landscape and the tonnes of pesticides and chemicals needed to keep them in good shape.

But now, in the 10th year of the downturn which has seen three recessions and spiralling unemployment, the golf culture is having a tough time.

A record number of courses went bust in 2001, with some 50 golf course operators filing for bankruptcy as the number of players plunged, according to the research institute Teikoku Databank.

On the green

In the economic boom of the late 1980s, a weekend round of golf with bosses or clients was virtually a job requirement for Japan's army of "salarymen".

The costs of games and golf club memberships skyrocketed as waiting lists for the top clubs stretched decades into the future.

And that helped bring a thriving futures market in the memberships into being, with millions of yen - and in the most rarefied cases millions of dollars - changing hands.

More than 100 million people were standing with their clubs on Japanese golf lawns - even though most could only afford to play a few times a year, spending the rest of the time, in full kit and with a bulging bag, practising on the driving range.

In the rough

But years of economic stagnation and decline reduced the number of golfers and the amount of money they spend.

Some analysts estimate that only 5-6% of more than 2,400 Japanese gulf courses are profitable while the rest are loaded with huge debts.

One of the recent collapses, in November, was Keina Kanko Kaihatsu, went under with debts totalling $200m (£138m).

And when one of the country's biggest clubs, Hatano Country Club, filed for bankruptcy in June, its debt burden was over half a billion dollars.

Grim outlook

Office space and real estate leasing companies, hotel chains, land developers and civil construction companies went bust in dozens in 2001 along with banks, retailers and insurers.

Japan's economy is predicted to decline by 0.75% this year and with two consecutive quarters of negative growth the country is officially in recession.

The government expects at least another one gloomy quarter ahead.

Unemployment is at a record 5%, its highest level since the Second World War.

The national currency, the yen plunged to its three-years low against the US dollar.

The Japanese economy is trapped in a cycle of falling prices and rising unemployment as consumers stubbornly refuse to spend money on goods that are dropping in value.

Hardly surprising, then that golf is hardly at the top of the average businessman's list of priorities these days.