Kawana Golf Club - Japan

In 1930, architect Charles Alison arrived on his historic visit to Japan to design the Tokyo Golf Club's new course. He then traveled with Komyo Otani to the retreat of Baron Kishichiro Akura at Kawana on the Izu Peninsula, famous for its hot springs, two to three hours south of Tokyo. The son of one of Japan's wealthiest industrialists, Akura had been educated at Cambridge and modeled his 500-acre estate after those he had admired in the English countryside. Akura then set about developing a world-class golf resort and hotel at Kawana. The first course at Kawana, the Oshima Course, was designed by Otani and completed in 1928. It is named for Oshima Island just off the coast, with its still smoldering volcano. Akura then hired Alison to design the Fuji Course, which opened in 1936. The course rises and plunges through the emerald green hills on a promontory above the sea, with cloud-covered Mt. Fuji in the distance rising above an inlet in the Pacific.

Bonari Kogen Golf Club - Japan

Bonari Kogen Golf Club is a course of exceptional beauty crafted from an abandoned sulfur mine in Fukushima, Japan. Designed by American golf architect Ronald Fream and founded by Masanori Tsujita, it took 13 years to transform the mining wasteland, which didn't have a single blade of grass, into coiling green fairways scaled with cloverleaf bunkers and rock-lined pools through the ridges of maple and pine. The most spectacular hole is the par-five third, laid out above scarred, reddish-brown cliffs formed by a great gash in the earth with a creek running below. The course is located within the Bandai National Park and is framed by the serene steel-blue peaks of the Adatara Mountain Range, including Mount Bandai.