Seiichi Inoue

Seiichi Inoue was a golf course architect, born on August 1, 1908 in Akasaka Ward of Tokyo City, now Minato Ward in Tokyo. He was the eldest son of an eye doctor, and as a boy, it is said, he was taken up with cameras and film. While he was at Seikei High School, under the old system, he fell ill with encephalitis lethargica, and his uncle Tatsushiro Inoue recommended golf as a way of recovering his health. That was how he came to the game.

What set him on design was the year 1930. He was at Kawana Hotel Golf Course (then the Oshima course) when he saw the work of Charles Hugh Alison, who had come over from England to design the Asaka course of Tokyo Golf Club, and he decided to try it himself. The following year, in 1931, on his uncle’s advice, he joined Kasumigaseki Country Club. The East course was then in the middle of the remodelling Alison had proposed, and Inoue came in as site assistant to George Pengrase, the engineer running the work. On the West course that followed he served as assistant to Kinya Fujita. He took a house next to Kasumigaseki, and the few years he spent there, studying Alison’s drawings and standing out on the ground, were his school of design.

In 1935 he went with Fujita to look over the site of Nasu Golf Club, but Fujita was in poor health and the design was left to Inoue. The course opened in 1936, when Inoue was 28. After the war, in 1948, he designed Awase Meadows Golf Club in Okinawa at the request of the American forces; in 1950 he joined Adachi Construction, and in 1951 he left it to work on his own account. The first large work after that was Oarai Golf Club, which opened in 1953. It was laid out on the sand facing the Kashima Sea, taking the native Japanese black pines as they stood for the frame of the course, on the thinking that the woods and the sea wind should be left to defend it.

Takanodai Country Club and Aichi Country Club followed (both 1954), then Nikko Country Club (1955), Ryugasaki Country Club and the Wattsu course of Sapporo Golf Club (both 1958), and counting only those still in play he left 39 courses. Abroad there are two more: Filipinas Golf & Country Club in the Philippines (1962) and Kelab Golf Negara Subang in Malaysia (1968). His stance never changed — to move as little earth as possible, to draw out what was already on the site and give each hole a character of its own — and a saying of his survives: golf is play and it is a pleasure, but it must have style and dignity about it. He died on November 26, 1981 at the age of 73. Thirty-six Japanese courses appear in the Top 1000 Golf Courses of the World chosen by Rolex, and eight of them are Inoue’s design. The business of building courses by Japanese hands was opened up by the generation of Kinya Fujita, the man who built Kasumigaseki; but it was Inoue who made it a profession for life and left his work across the country. That is what lies behind his being called the foremost figure in Japanese golf course design.

See the other golf course architects here.