Koganei Country Club

About the club

Koganei Country Club brought in Walter Hagen to lay out its course not long after the war ended, and it ended up being one of only a few courses designed by that great match player of the mid-twentieth century. Hagen's course attracted the Japan Amateur Championship in that crucial year for Japanese golf, 1957, when the country won the Canada (now World) Cup Championship and went crazy for the game. The course has remained largely unaltered, so that at 6154 meters it now lacks the length for tournaments. Despite, or perhaps in part because of, this fact, Koganei has become one of Japan's most exclusive clubs; by 2006, membership cost a whopping 450,000,000 yen. One improvement over the years has been the replacement of the traditional rough Korai grass with the smoother bent grass, though the double greens have been retained in order to maintain a vintage feel.