By William Kelly
Another First for Atlantic City Golf
The Atlantic City Country Club, having opened in 1897 at a resort known as the “Playground of the World,” often introduced visiting tourists to the game of golf for the first time, and in some cases inspired the creation of other courses, most notably Seaview, Pine Valley, Oakmont, Wildwood, Great Bay and Tokyo.
Tokyo? Oriental golfers have been making their mark, especially on the women’s tour, and the casinos have been courting oriental gamblers, many of whom play golf. So there is a renewed interest in the history of golf in Japan, where the first golf course opened in 1914.
One of the most interesting development in the research of the history of golf in Japan is that the first Japanese to play golfer in America was introduced to the game at the Atlantic City Country Club, once known as “the Northfield Links,” being situated in the offshore community of Northfield.
New research by a Japanese golf historian indicates that the first oriental golfer to play in the United States, Japanese silk merchant Ryoichiro Arai, played his first game at the “Northfield Links,” today known as the venerable Atlantic City Country Club, adding another first to it’s prominent list of firsts.
Kenny Robinson, who has been a manager of the club for over thirty years, learned of the oriental connection when Japanese golfer Kazunori Ohtsuka visited the club and mentioned the story of Ryoichiro Arai to Robinson. More oriental golfers have been playing the Atlantic City Country Club since Bally-Hilton, now Caesar’s Entertainment, purchased the club a few years ago, and restricted play to company executives and guests, primarily high-rollers who have an affinity for the game.
Now the course is open to the public and there is increased interest in its history, especially the oriental angle.
In a letter to Robinson, Ohtsuka wrote, “The first Japanese who played golf in the USA is said that he played in 1899 at Westfied Country Club in Atlantic City, New Jersey.”
When Ohtsuka researched further however, he found that the only golf club in a Westfield is the Shackamaxon Golf and Country Club, near New York City, and founded decades after 1899. This led to back to Atlantic City. “My assumption is that ‘Northfield’ was mistakenly informed as ‘Westfield.’ So he actually played in 1899 at a course in Northfield of Atlantic City. This means that the course in question must be yours as yours is the only one there in that specific year,” Ohtsuka wrote to Robinson.
Indeed, the Atlantic City Country Club was founded by Atlantic City hotel owners in 1897, and was known as “the Northfield Links” in its early years.
“Past Japanese golf historians must have (been) confused!” Ohtsuka concluded.
And the first oriental golfer in the United States was certainly not know for his golf, but his business savy as one of the first and premier silk merchants from Japan. According to Brian Niiya’s ) Japanese-American history, 1993), Ryosuke Arai was born in 1855 under the name Ryosuke Hoshnio in Gumma prefucture, Ryosuke was the 5th son of the Hoshino silk producing family. Later adopted by the Arai family, Ryoichiro studied in Tokyo, where he learned English and accounting, and was encouraged to promote the direct silk trade between Japan and America, not only for his family, but for his country Japan.
Before he left however, he was presented with the gift of the sword of Yoshida Shoin, a Samurai warrior who became a great martyr-hero of modern Japanese nationalism. According to Arai’s biography, “Samurai and Silk– A Japanese and American History (Belknap Press, Harvard, 1986), written by his grand daughter Haru Matsukata Reischauer, Arai “took great interest in American politics and followed them closely. But he was happiest when he had tome to get on the golf course.”
According to Reischauer, “He had been introduced to the game around 1902 when he was at Pinehurst, North Carolina, recouperating from an illness. Golf was just beginning to become popular in the United States. Andrew Carnegie, at a dinner party for my other grandfather in 1902, presented him with a set of clubs and toasted the development of golf in Japan, with Matsukata as its patron. Actually Matsukata never used the clubs since he was already sixty-five and there were no golf courses in Japan, and it remained for Arai to stimulate interest there in the game.”
But according to Ohtsuka, Arai said that Arai’s son more recently told him that his father first took up the game in 1900 at the “Westfield Links” near Atlantic City.
Arriving in New York in March of 1876 he formed the Sato Arai company, before representing the Doshin firm, completing the first direct transaction between a Japanese producer and an American importer. The Japanese silk trade eventually became the largest source of raw silk for American industry. In 1893 Ryosuke Arai formed two new companies, and in 1901 was elected to the board of governors of the Silk Association of America. In 1905 he helped establish the Nippon club and in 1907 the Japanese society of New York.
In its early years the Atlantic City Country Club was owned by Atlantic City Hotel operators, who catered mainly to the Philadelphia and New York clientele who came down to Atlantic City in the summer, and often in the winter to play golf because the bayside course seldom sported snow.
“After taking up golf himself,” Reischauer reports, “Arai presented all his Japanese friends in New York to join him in the sport. Murai was hard to win over. ‘Why,’ he asked, ‘should I get up early in the morning on my vacations and spend the day chasing a silly little ball around the golf course?’ He finally agreed to take one swing at a ball if Arai would get down on his knees in front of the ball and bow three times, touching the ground with his forehead. Arai did this and Murai took a swing at the ball, which shot high into the air and landed at some distance. Murai was delighted and thenceforth became Arai’s inseparable golf companion.”
“Another Japanese whom Arai converted into a golf enthusiast was Inoue Junnosuke (1869-1932), later a leading financier and politician in Japan and at the time manager of the Yokomhma Specie Bank in New York. When Inoue was transferred to Tokyo he took back with him such a love for the game that he got together in 1913 a small group of fellow members of the prestigious Tokyo Club and founded a golf club, with its links at Komazawa in the countryside west of Tokyo. The farmers, whose land was needed for the golf course, were dubious about the whole project, having no idea what golf was, but they were so impressed by the mansion of a former daimyo in which Inoue lived that they agreed to the deal. The golf club at Komazawa was the first in Japan for Japanese, although the English residents of Kiobe had earlier built one for their own use on Mt. Rokko behind the city.”
“Although Arai was not a participant in the organization of the Tokyo Golf Club at Komazawa, he had stimulated the interest that lay behind its founding and he became a charter member. Each time he returned to Japan, one of the first things he did was to play at Komazawa with Inoue and other friends. Because of the growth of the city, the golf course was later moved to Asaka in Saitama prefecture. Inoue never got to play on the new course (he was assassinated by a member of a right-wing organization in 1932), but Arai did play there on his last trip to Japan in 1935. He was then eighty, and to the amazement of his younger partners he played eighteen holes with no sign of fatigue.”
In America Arai was a member of two golf clubs, one in Stamford and the other in Greenwich, after which he would eat dinner, ending it with a bowl of rice and some Japanese pickles and tea, before playing two games of go with Murai.
Golf however, may have been his downfall. According to Reischauer, “In the winter of 1939, Arai had patiently waited for the snow to melt so that he could get out on the golf course. One day in early April, though it was still cold, he played eighteen holes and returned home elated with his good score, though somewhat tired. It turned out that he had caught pneumonia and he never recovered, dying on April 9 at the age of eighty-four.”
He died in America in 1939, and was buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, a service conducted by the First Reader of the Christian Science Church of Stamford, since he had converted to Christianity in 1919. “He was mourned by Japanese and Americans alike,”notes Reischauer, “and the American Commodity Exchange paid him the unusual tribute of silence while the funeral was in progress.”
There is more to this story than just silk and golf however. Ryoichiro Arai’s granddaughter Haru Matsukata (1915-1998), was a journalist who married Edwin Reischauer, President John F. Kennedy’s Ambassador to Japan. Living near the Belmont Country Club in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where her husband later taught Japanese history at Harvard, Mrs. Haru Reischauer wrote the book “Samurai and Silk : A Japanese Heritage” (Belknap Press, Harvard, 1986), a duel biography of her grandfathers, Matsukata Masayoshi, a statesman of the Meiji Era, and Arai Ryoichiro, the pioneer in the Japan-US silk trade. Besides documenting Arai’s love for the game of golf, it is a classic text of early Japanese – American trade relations and the story of the founding of the Tokyo Club and other Japanese – American interests.
So the first oriental golfer to play in America, Japanese amateur Ryosuke Arai, was first introduced to the game at the Northfield Links near Atlantic City.
It is one of a dozen “firsts” in a list of Atlantic City Country Club firsts, which includes the first inter-collegiate game (Harvard won in 1901), the first use of a Haskell ball to win a sanctioned tournament (1901 U.S. Amateur Championship, Walter Travis), the first use of the term ‘birdie’ to reflect a score of one-under par (December, 1903), the first native American professional to win the U.S. Open (John McDermott, 19 years, 1911-1912), the first use of the term ‘eagle’ for two-under par, the first of “Babe” Didrikson Zaharias’s three U.S. Women’s Open championships (1948), the first U.S. Women’s Open to be televised live (1965) and the first tournament of what is now the U.S. Senior’s Open (1980).
[William Kelly is the author of “Birth of the Birdie – The First 100 Years of Golf at Atlantic City Country Club.” He can be reached at Billykelly1@aol.com]