Mangled English, Beer, Baths: All Par for the Course in Japan

You’re on a golf course in Japan, and a player in your party hits a great tee shot, sending the ball straight down the fairway in a perfect arc.

What should you say? Maybe “Yokatta!” meaning “Great!” Or “Sugoi!”--”Wow!”--or perhaps a more reserved “Yoku dekimashita”--”Well done.”

All perfect Japanese--and all dead wrong. When on the links in Japan, do as the Japanese do: speak English.

Well, sort of.

“Nice-su shot-o!”players and caddies shouted as the ball sailed through a light rain one recent morning at a golf club outside Tokyo. I was the only foreigner on the course that day--and the only one yelling out “Yokatta!”

Brought to Japan by an English tea merchant in 1901, golf is perhaps the closest thing to a national religion here, with millions of adherents and more than 1,500 places of worship.

It’s also a perfect example of the Japanese passion for making foreign things uniquely their own.

True, golf is just one of the foreign imports that comes with its own vocabulary of appropriated English words. Baseball, computers and even food are all areas where foreign terms are indispensable.

But golf is an extreme case. Consider this: You stand at the tee, pronounced, in phonetic Japanese, as “chee.” You swing (“suweengu”) your club (“kurabu”) at the ball (“boru”), aiming of course for the hole (“horu”).

If you make it past the bunker (“bunkaa”), you’ll get on the green (“gureenu”), hoping for a nice par (“nysuu paa”).

Golf’s exotic edge got it into trouble during World War II. Officials bent on purging harmful foreign influences replaced English terms in baseball with Japanese words, but they gave up when it came to golf--”gorufu”--and just banned the whole sport.

Despite the foreign aura, there is plenty in a day on a golf course to remind you this isn’t the United States, beginning with the price--up to 30,000 yen--$270--for a round.

My friends and I set out at 7:30 a.m. for the two-hour drive from Tokyo to the Ohtakijo Club in Chiba Prefecture, following the trail of thousands of Tokyo residents who flee the cramped city for the area’s dozens of golf courses every weekend.

Bellhops whisked away our clubs and a valet took the car. We entered a building luxurious as a five-star hotel and registered.

Then on to breakfast: a full buffet of scrambled eggs, little roasted hot dogs and assorted Japanese breakfast choices, including gooey, fermented soy beans called natto. Thirsty? Coffee, tea, juice--and beer. A couple of guests started off their day with a frosty draft.

Japanese customers expect great service, and they get it. McDonald’s cashiers bow to customers and barbers give shoulder massages along with a haircut. Golf fits right in: you get both a golf cart and a caddy.

Throughout the day, the caddy makes spot calculations of your distance from the pin at any point on the fairway and counsels golfers on how to avoid the dreaded “Oh Bee” (out-of-bounds).

Many urban Japanese face hectic lives of lengthy commutes and long hours at work. No rushing here. After breakfast, we hit four or five holes and then rested a bit at a snack shop on the course.

After the front nine, it’s lunch time. I limited myself to some light sandwiches, but my friends feasted on rows of sushi arranged on the deck of a small replica of a ship. And more “beeru.”

At the end of the back nine--and another snack break--players verified each other’s score cards, which were then fed into a computer that spit out the day’s ranking, handicaps included.

Next was the awards ceremony. Everyone sat on chairs arranged along the walls of a large room, gazing at four tables in the center stocked with food and drink.

About a dozen pricey prizes were given out, including a set of clubs and a trip to Guam. To spare the worst scorer some embarrassment, a prize was given to the next-to-last golfer--the “booby”--though the last-ranked player is called the “booby-maker.” Coming in 76th out of 78 players, I was saved from any involvement with the boobies.

At this point, some players were ready for the long trip back to Tokyo. But not my hosts--it was on to the bath, a staple at Japanese golf clubs.

We sat at little stools to soap and rinse ourselves down, and then dipped into water piped in from a hot spring. Afterward, we sat on recliners equipped with mechanical massagers.

Then, 11 hours after setting out that morning, we headed back home to the grey apartment blocks, factories and endless highway overpasses of Tokyo.