Golf Pollution

JAPAN

In the big cities the lines start forming shortly after 3 a.m. Even the most polite are inclined to forget themselves as they fight for one of Japan's scarcest commodities: space on the golf course. So popular has the game become that it is regularly played by an estimated one-tenth of Japan's 108 million people, ranging from the Prime Minister to Zen monks. So many gorufu courses are being built that some environmentalists are complaining about a new kind of pollution: golf pollution.

Already the land-poor country's 700 golf courses take up as much space as 1 1/2 Tokyos. Seven hundred more courses are on the planning boards, and nature lovers have nightmares of the whole country eventually being converted into one vast patchwork of putting greens and sand traps. In Chiba prefecture, southeast of Tokyo, there are so many courses that the area is becoming known as "the golfers' Ginza."

Chiba officials worry that wells may run dry just keeping grass green on the 22,000 acres of land devoted to golf.

What concerns critics is that there is almost no way to construct a golf course in Japan without violating nature. Most of the flat land in the mountainous nation has long since been given over to cities and needed farms; by necessity, many greens have been put on hillsides, where they result in the destruction of forests, blocked streams and erosion. "There's something definitely abnormal about this, a bit of sheer outlandishness," says Chiba prefecture's governor, Taketo Tomono, an occasional golfer. To discourage the building of more courses, Tomono's government has stipulated that they must meet severe--perhaps impossible --ecological standards. "It will be tough indeed," he boasts, "for a new course to open up in our prefecture." Following Tomono's lead, at least 35 of Japan's 46 other prefectures have come up with anti-golf land laws.

Many think that the environmentalists are overstating the case, and that golf is hardly in the same league as the other pollutions strangling Japan.

"Much of what is called golf pollution is something altogether imagined or emotional," says Norio Nomura, an official at the Ministry of Construction in Tokyo. "When the most precious commodity in Japan--land--gets grabbed up fast, the people react sharply and emotionally." Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka, a devoted golfer, adds: "Golf courses retain greenery. Japan needs more greenery and more golf courses."

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