In the canon of twentieth-century golf architecture, Charles Hugh Alison is the figure most often mentioned in the same breath as Alister MacKenzie, then quietly relegated to a footnote. The footnote is wrong. Alison’s six months in Japan in 1930 produced more enduring design work — by routing, by influence, by the architectural lineage of what was built afterwards — than most architects produce in a career.
He was sent by his partner Harry Colt at the invitation of Kinya Fujita, who was building Kasumigaseki and wanted Western expertise on the bunkering. Alison stayed for six months. He drew or revised Tokyo Golf Club, Hirono, Naruo, Otaru, Kawana Fuji, Hodogaya, Yokohama. He left a bunkering style — flashed, deep, vertically faced — that the Japanese named after him and that every architect working in the country since has either followed or self-consciously departed from.
The work was almost lost.
For sixty years, much of Alison’s work in Japan was being slowly redesigned out of itself.
The decades after the war were not kind to Alison’s Japanese courses. Bunkers were softened. Trees grew in where strategy had once been. Fairways were narrowed. The wrong grasses arrived. The vocabulary of post-war Japanese course maintenance — manicured, photogenic, easy — was not the vocabulary in which Alison had written. A round at Naruo in 1985 was not a round at the course Alison and Crane had drawn.
The recovery began in the 1990s and has accelerated in the last fifteen years. Tanaka at Tokyo Golf Club. Tanaka and the Saito family at Kasumigaseki ahead of the 2020 Olympics. The quiet generational work at Hirono, where the membership has, with characteristic patience, allowed three architects to take three turns at recovering Alison’s lines without altering them. Otaru — perhaps the most isolated restoration project in the country — is mid-way through the work now.
It is not a celebrated movement. It does not get a magazine cover. It is, in our view, the single most important architectural conversation in Japanese golf — and it is the reason the Restoration Award in this year’s Guide will go to a Japanese course working on the recovery of an Alison design.
We have not yet decided which.