There is no architectural argument in Japanese golf that begins anywhere other than Hirono. Charles Hugh Alison routed it in 1932, on a piece of land an hour west of Kobe that, even now, feels too quiet for what it holds. The fairways thread between rock outcrops and pine. The bunkering — flashed up, ragged, deep — is what every great Japanese course built since has either imitated or refused to imitate. The membership has resisted, with what must be described as the patience of a religious order, every gust of modernisation in the ninety-four years since.
It is the most authoritative course in Asia, and quite possibly in the world east of the Mediterranean.
What Alison did at Hirono cannot be separated from when he did it. He arrived in Japan in 1930 at the invitation of Kinya Fujita, having already finished his collaboration with MacKenzie on Cypress Point. He spent six months in the country, working at speed and on foot, designing or revising what would become almost every important pre-war Japanese course — Tokyo Golf Club, Kawana Fuji, Kasumigaseki, Naruo’s redesign, Otaru. The bunkering style he gave them — what the Japanese began calling, with characteristic precision, Arison banker — is the visual signature of every great inland course in the country.
Alison spent six months in Japan and shaped a century of the game there.
But Hirono was the one he kept coming back to. The 1932 routing has been touched, sparingly, by Tanaka and the late Saito family across three restorations. Each was an act of recovery, not improvement. The seventh — that vertiginous downhill par three over the rocks — is the hole Alison drew. The fourteenth — the long, quiet two-shotter that opens onto the lake — is the hole Alison drew. None of the original eighteen has been routed elsewhere.
A round at Hirono, played in the autumn when the maples turn and the air thins, is a piece of evidence. It says: the modern Japanese course began here. It says: a hundred years of resistance to the various international fashions in design has produced the most permanent example of what the Alison style was meant to be. It says, more quietly: a course can be a museum without being a relic.
Hirono receives the inaugural Three-Flag rating from the Japan Edition of the Guide. There is no other place where the rating could have started.