Kinya Fujita

Kinya Fujita was a Japanese golf course architect, born on November 7, 1889 at Komagome in Tokyo City, now Toshima Ward in Tokyo. He was a nephew of Ryohei Toyokawa, an executive of Mitsubishi Bank, and took the name Fujita on succeeding to his mother’s family. He graduated from Waseda University, then a professional school under the old system, in 1910, spent three years at Mitsubishi Bank and then crossed to the United States with his elder brother. He studied at Miami University in Ohio and later spent a short period at Columbia University. It was during this stay in America that he learned golf.

In 1917 he went out to the United States again, as head of sales at the New York branch opened by Hara Gomei Kaisha, a raw silk trading house, and he returned to Japan in 1921. Once home he became a member of Tokyo Golf Club and of Hodogaya Country Club, which opened the year after. While running a trading office of his own he joined Shiro Akaboshi and others in a move to build a new course in Saitama Prefecture. In January 1928 Fujita went out to the site and satisfied himself that land belonging to Shohei Hotchi would serve for a course. The club was founded in January of the following year, 1929, and on October 6 of that year the East course of Kasumigaseki Country Club opened.

The East course was designed by the founding members taking a share of the holes each, with Fujita drawing the whole together. Eighteen holes finished by Japanese hands alone, it stands as a large piece of work from the early years of course design in this country. In 1931 the British architect C. H. Alison came out and proposed a remodelling of the East course, which his assistant George Pengrase carried out. What Fujita had in hand alongside it was the West course, and the club’s records set it down as “design: Kinya Fujita, assistant: Seiichi Inoue” (some sources give the West course to Inoue alone). The West course opened in June 1932, and Kasumigaseki became the first golf club in the East to have 36 holes.

He went on designing after the war, leaving Chiba Country Club Noda course (1954), Izu Kokusai Country Club (1961), Higashimatsuyama Country Club (1963), Shizuoka Country Shimada Golf Course (1965), the Kajikawa course of Shiun Golf Club (1965), Yawata Country Club (1968) and Chikuma Kogen Country Club (1969), among others. His way of building was to move little earth and to use the rise and fall of the ground and the ponds as he found them, and he is remembered as a man with a gift for reading a wide piece of land and judging how it should be divided up. Greater than any of it, though, was that he brought Seiichi Inoue, whom he had used as an assistant on site, out into the world as an architect in his own right. A pioneer of golf course design in Japan, he died in 1970. At Higashimatsuyama Country Club, a course of his own design, a memorial competition bearing Kinya Fujita’s name has long been played.

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