japan Abiko Golf Club's Makeover

Brian Silva is working up a master plan for renovations of Abiko Golf Club in suburban Tokyo.

Abiko, one of Japan’s oldest clubs (it opened in 1930), is probably best known as the place where Isao Aoki, the Japanese golf star, learned to play. Aoki was born in Abiko, a northeastern suburb of Tokyo, and he caddied at Abiko.

The club’s 6,500-yard course was designed by Rokuro Akaboshi, a Princeton grad and a golf pro who won the inaugural Japan Open, in 1927. After making the obligatory pilgrimage to Scotland and building some courses in Japan for C. H. Alison, Akaboshi designed something like 60 golf courses in Japan and Southeast Asia, although most of them were destroyed during World War II.

“He really studied golf courses,” says Silva. “Abiko has some of the greatest strategic potential of any course I’ve seen in a long time.”

Silva, who’s based in Dover, New Hampshire, was particularly struck by the quality of Akaboshi’s routing (“he didn’t fight the land in a single spot”) and the quality of his greens complexes (“interesting to play without being goofy”).

The course has summer and winter greens on each hole, as do many of the earliest courses built in Japan. Silva will reduce the layout to 18 greens, all of them to be rebuilt and regrassed and, in some cases, relocated. He also plans to lengthen the course by at least 200 yards, rebuild its tees, greens, and bunkers, and maybe install a new irrigation system.

Silva, who doesn’t get out of the country much -– he’s designed four courses in Italy and one in Guatemala, all of them more than a decade ago -– was recommended for the job by Sho Tobari, a course rater for Golf magazine and a member at Abiko. The renovation is expected to begin in 2010, but, as Silva notes, “you never really know.”

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