Environment : Critics Take Swing at Japan’s Golf Courses : They are scarring the land, fouling the water and encouraging political corruption, activists claim.

Greener than the rice paddies and forests they have smothered, the golf courses here on Japan’s “Golf Ginza” are the most expensive--and pampered--in the world.

The wonder-green fairways look paradisiacal enough--until it rains. Then the courses ooze water the color of old blood. The musty-smelling runoff is laced with herbicides, pesticides, dyes, fertilizers and other pollutants. Farmers have given up trying to grow rice downstream.

Japanese have long revered golf as a symbol of outdoorsy affluence and an antidote for all the ills to which their overcrowded civilization is heir. But now they are discovering that their beloved recreation may not be as wholesome and beneficial as it seemed.

Critics say the green links and the big money they have generated are a magnet for real estate speculators, unscrupulous developers and yakuza, or gangsters.

And now Japan is exporting its golf woes. American, Japanese and Southeast Asian environmentalists say the industry is becoming a global ecological menace--and a powerful force for political corruption.

Japanese golf course developers are accused of devouring precious farmland and forests, destroying open spaces, contaminating water and even threatening coral reefs--not just in Japan but at resorts that cater to golf-crazed tourists in Guam, Hawaii, California, Australia and across the Pacific Basin.

Moreover, there are disturbing allegations that some of the overseas developers are mobsters laundering profits for the Asian criminal underworld.

“Golf is a big moneymaker and it’s a great way to launder money,” said a senior U.S. law enforcement official. Organized crime penetration of Hawaiian golf course resorts is “very serious,” the official said.

Along with the environmental threat come political problems: allegations of bribes being paid to local officials from Japan to Thailand to Hawaii; high-pressure tactics to persuade landowners to sell; eviction of tenants or squatters from land earmarked for fairways, and resentment by locals who are often barred from the expensive and exclusive golf clubs.

“Native people are being pushed off their land and ending up working as golf caddies,” said Richard A. Forrest, a representative of the National Wildlife Federation.

In Hawaii, a group of tenant farmers who face eviction have filed a federal lawsuit against a Japanese-Korean golf course developer with a shady past. The suit asserts there has been racketeering, bribery, mail fraud, conspiracy and “terroristic threatening,” said Anthony Locricchio, the farmers’ attorney.

He claims that the developer sent armed men to intimidate the tenant farmers--even slaughtering one rancher’s prize breeding bull. “It’s been the kind of stuff the Wild, Wild West was made of.”

The Osaka-based developer denies any wrongdoing.

In Thailand, where 80 golf courses operate, the owners of such facilities compete with farmers for scarce water supplies, said Daycha Siripatra, director of the nonprofit Technology for Rural & Ecological Enrichment.

In land-scarce South Korea, where 128 golf courses are under construction, the Alliance for Anti-Pollution Movement says stopping new projects is a top priority, after water pollution and nuclear waste disposal. The group’s Lee Guen Haeng claims that the courses have caused toxic runoff and flooding of rice paddies.

Kim Tok Woo, an Environment Ministry official, said golf courses do not cause pollution. But officials have banned them within 12 miles of a reservoir.

Environmentalists concede that the hazards of golf are unlikely to rank high on the eco-agenda of a world struggling to cope with global warming and other threats.

Nevertheless, the “Global Network for Anti-Golf Course Action,” a coalition group, was formed in Tokyo in April. “There is no more room on Earth to destroy nature for the sake of a mere game,” said Gen Morita, a Japanese anti-golf activist.

Clearly, there isn’t any more room in Japan. This nation has 1,850 golf courses already operating, 300 under construction and plans for 1,000 more. That’s still not enough for Japan’s 12 million golfers, who must often wait months for a reservation.

Only 15% of Japan’s land is flat enough for farming--and every square centimeter is spoken for. That means developers must buy up pricey farmland, or more often, carve golf courses out of the hills, causing tree loss and soil erosion.

Golf overcrowding is especially acute in the “Golf Ginza” in Saitama Prefecture (State), an hour’s train ride from downtown Tokyo. Mountainsides have been bulldozed into putting greens as perfect--and as artificial--as Zen rock gardens.

Environmentalists say an 18-hole course requires up to four tons of fertilizer, pesticides and herbicides each year. Course operators say they have cut back on chemicals and undergo water-quality inspections. They also insist that golf courses use fewer toxic chemicals than do farms.

What is undisputed is that golf courses are transforming what little undeveloped land remains within day-trip range of Tokyo.

In the town of Hatoyama, golf courses hog 20% of the total terrain. Nearby hills are covered with the naked wounds of forests felled to make space for more.

“Tokyo people don’t seem to care about this,” said Kazutoshi Sasanuma, a 43-year-old chicken farmer, as he surveyed 150 bulldozed acres on a mountain where a rare species of Japanese hawk used to nest. “The people who play golf in particular don’t give a damn that they’re destroying our villages. It makes me so angry.”

Japan’s anti-golf movement teed off as a rural protest in 1988 and is now considered one of the most potent environmental crusades in the country. Activists have won restrictions on clear-cutting and pesticide use, halted developments and defeated one pro-golf mayor at the polls.

In Ranzan, golf foes have sued their town, Saitama Prefecture and Masao Kobayashi, developer of a proposed 250-acre country club. According to activist Mitsuyo Iegana, the development was approved after Kobayashi took 70 or so town residents to a resort, loaded them with gifts and allegedly bribed local officials.

Kobayashi is serving a two-year prison sentence for evading $16 million in taxes on profits he earned from other real estate deals. But the golf course development is proceeding without him.

Yakuza have allegedly been hired to pressure landowners into selling to developers. But the gangsters also seem to enjoy golf as much as other Japanese, and can be spotted putting away at exclusive country clubs.

Saitama’s elite golf clubs are not amused, and many have stiffened their membership criteria to try to freeze out the yakuza. Anyone with tattoos or without a pinky finger--both telltale signs of gang affiliation--need not apply, said Masao Negishi, managing director of the old-money Higashimatsuyama Country Club.

Golf has lost some of its economic luster with the collapse of Japan’s “bubble economy.” Along with the stock and real estate markets, golf course membership prices have plunged 50% since 1990, and several big-time developers have gone belly-up.

While golfing in Japan may cost half of what it did two years ago, it is still hardly a bargain--a membership in Saitama’s most exclusive club is now trading for about $553,000. At the Honolulu Country Club, a membership costs $69,000.

An anti-golf course movement in Hawaii is carrying its battle to Japan. In an audacious, even quixotic move, Hawaiian activist Mary Protheroe held a news conference in Tokyo in April and beseeched the Japanese public to stop buying into golf courses on the islands.

One of Protheroe’s targets is the Royal Hawaiian Country Club on Oahu. The club is trying to evict farmers and ranchers it claims are squatting on land slated for a 36-hole golf course.

Royal Hawaiian’s owner, Yasuo Yasuda, a Japanese-born Korean whose real name is Han Kuk Chun, also runs pachinko (Japanese pinball) parlors and a soft-drink vending machine company in Osaka. Organized crime experts have linked him to an offshoot of the Yamaguchi yakuza, for whom he allegedly handled investments--an assertion his company denies.

In 1989, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service deported Chun for falsely stating on a visa application that he had no criminal record. He appealed, and has been allowed back in the United States.

Kazuhiko Takeoka, spokesman for Royal Hawaiian Ltd. in Osaka, said Chun has never had any link to organized crime. “He may have made mistakes in the past. No human being is perfect,” Takeoka said. He politely declined to discuss Chun’s record.

In the long run, environmentalists are unlikely to halt golf course proliferation unless they can first convert the Japanese public to a more Earth-friendly sport.

So far, golfers show no signs of trading in their irons for nature walks. But then, the anti-golf forces have only just begun their assault on the game’s pastoral image.

“Why is it benign to go out and destroy nature to create something that, while green, is totally artificial?” said Forrest of the National Wildlife Federation. “Its only benefit is to create an illusory natural experience for privileged people.”

Times staff writer Teresa Watanabe and Tokyo bureau researcher Megumi Shimizu contributed to this report.