Golf in the hills

There are roughly 2500 golf courses in Japan. The photo shows a playing partner negotiating the snow at the 148 yard 4th of one of them.

For the last five years, an average of a hundred courses have gone bankrupt every year. I asked the local maths teacher if this course had suffered the same fate. He laughed and answered, "Several times."

One of the previous owners had done prison time for his part in the financial shenanigans and he is attached to one of the more unsavoury elements of Japanese society. Lots of golf courses are connected with the yakuza - after all, golf clubs involve real estate, construction, and finance ... the holy trinity of the organised crime world.

Golf club memberships in Japan can be bought and sold in much the same way as stocks and shares. At their peak fifteen or so years ago, memberships at exclusive clubs cost several hundred million yen. Now they are worth just a fraction. My playing partners all had their fingers burnt, albeit on a much smaller scale.

Golf takes a long time in Japan. We teed off at about 10am and the winning putt was holed at just before 5pm. That's far too long, but I was the only one in our foursome who thought so. It was fun though.

We stopped for lunch at the halfway point, and drank some beer and sake to ward off the cold, which meant the tee shots on the back nine were a little wayward.

The course had no escalators, no train rides to take players from green to clubhouse, and our golf buggy wasn't even remote controlled - we had to drive ourselves. The shame of it.

The financial cloud that hangs over many courses has a wonderfully thick silver lining for the average Joe - my round of golf cost me just 5000 yen (about 25 quid), a sum that was almost unthinkable a few years ago.