West Course at Kasumigaseki Country Club

About the club

Kasumigaseki Country Club was founded in the late 1920s by wealthy amateur architect Kinya Fujita, who attended an American college and afterward became acquainted with Charles H. Alison when the latter was creating the course for Tokyo Golf Club. Fujita enlisted the help of local designer Seiichi Inoue and laid out a course of his own, to which Alison afterward added some finishing touches. One example of Alison's influence is the deep bunkering that is best known from his course at Hirono, and that goes by his name throughout Japan. Renovations in the Nineties were carried out by Taizo Kawata, whose main contribution was the introduction of modern grasses that did away with the need for the original double greens. The West Course at Kasumigaseki has more water than the East; thus the Japan Open there in 2006 was dominated by those best able to negotiate the brooks on the back nine.