The flight from Tokyo Haneda to New Chitose is ninety minutes. From Chitose to Otaru, with a stop for coffee and the particular Hokkaido obligation of looking at the volcano, it is another two and a half hours. We arrived at the Otaru Country Club in the rain on a Sunday afternoon in early September, and the rain stopped exactly as we walked onto the first tee.
The four of us — an architect, a photographer, a writer, and a member of the Otaru committee who had agreed to be our guide for the week — had come north for the same reason anyone serious comes north. Hokkaido is the part of Japan most often described in English-language golf writing as “the Scotland of Japan,” which is wrong in two specific and instructive ways. The land is firmer and the wind is less. But the soil is what matters, and the Hokkaido soil is the closest thing in Japan to the sandy ground on which the original game was meant to be played.
Hokkaido is not the Scotland of Japan. It is the part of Japan where the ground argues back.
We played Otaru on Sunday and Monday — the second day in proper autumn light, the fairways already crisping. Otaru is an Alison design, the northernmost of his Japanese commissions, and the routing has a kind of solemnity that you do not find at his warmer-climate work. The bunkering is more conservative; the green complexes are flatter; the prevailing wind off the Sea of Japan is the architect’s main hazard. It plays slowly and rewards conviction.
Tuesday and Wednesday were Hokkaido Classic — the Nicklaus design at Chitose, on land that was rice field until 1992. It is, in design terms, a foreign object in this part of the country. Nicklaus arrived in the early nineties with the design vocabulary that had made him the most successful architect of the era and applied it intact to a piece of Hokkaido that had nothing in common with anywhere else he had worked. The course is impressive. It is not native. We argued about it for two evenings.
Thursday was a return to Otaru for the photographs. Friday was the drive back to Chitose for the flight, with the obligatory stop at the volcano. The week resolved nothing about the question of whether the future of Hokkaido golf belongs to the Alison vocabulary or to whatever comes after it. We did, however, agree that the volcano was the best lunch view we had ever had.
We are going back next year, in winter, when the courses are closed and the snow gives the routing a different argument.