Trip report: Japan 2019 — Kawana, Hirono, and the morning the fog cleared over Fuji

The Japan trip I ran in May 2019 was our second full group departure there and the one that convinced me Japan should be a permanent fixture in the portfolio rather than an occasional special itinerary.

Eight clients. Ages 52 to 71. Six had been to Japan before — three on business, two on a previous holiday, one on a cruise that had stopped in Osaka. None had played golf there. The conversion conversation — from 'we've been to Japan' to 'we've never played golf there, which is completely different' — took about twenty minutes on the first phone call.

The itinerary: Tokyo for one night (arriving, adjusting, eating sushi in a basement in Ginza at the recommendation of the Kawana Hotel concierge who had sent us the name unprompted), then Kawana Hotel for three nights, Gotemba Golf Club for one round, Hirono Golf Club for two nights and two rounds, then the Shinkansen to Kyoto for two nights before the flight home.

Kawana's Fuji Course on day two: the morning we arrived there was fog on the mountain — not covering it, but sitting at the level of the treeline, leaving the summit visible above the cloud. The 15th hole (par-3, 151 yards, directly toward the mountain) produced a silence among the group that I've now seen at Leopard Creek, at Old Head, and at Pebble Beach. The combination of the course architecture and the mountain behind it does something that cannot be adequately photographed.

Hirono: this is Japan's version of Augusta in the conversation about the country's finest course. Designed in 1932 by Charles Alison — who also designed Kasumigaseki and influenced Japanese golf course design for four decades — Hirono has a formality and a precision that feels unlike anywhere else I've played. The members were, to a person, welcoming in a way that required no common language. Tea was served. The caddies were extraordinary.

The last evening: we were in a small restaurant in Kyoto, the eight of them, and the organiser — a retired solicitor from Berkshire who had initially asked me 'why would we go to Japan when we haven't done South Africa yet?' — made a small speech. He said: 'James told us this would be the most surprising trip we'd ever taken. I assumed that was a sales line. It wasn't.'

We have run Japan every year since. Every client group has said some version of the same thing.