Life In Japan: Ground Golf

There’s “community life” in my community.

In my village called Noma, which is on the very eastern edge of town, as I’ve mentioned before, we get together regularly to clean up the “neighborhood”.  Of course, most of the area which hosts the 40 or 50 houses in our village consists of rice and soybean fields.  When I refer to the neighborhood, I’m actually talking about the irrigation canals and ditches, retainer walls, our shrine hillock dedicated to Benten, a goddess of art and music.  We also have an annual barbecue, our curry and bingo party, and a number of ceremonies celebrating holidays throughout the year.

That’s just my local village get-togethers.  Mind you, similar ones are taking place across the entire city, in each of the twelve or so local villages.  All of these are organized as neighborhood happenings, where it’s likely everyone attending will be at least somewhat familiar with one another.  

Then there’s all of the city-wide activities for Sasayama — just this past May renamed Tambasasayama [丹波篠山市] in a special election — organized for all 42,000 of the city’s residents.  I’ve mentioned elsewhere the Dekansho Festival in August and the Festival of the Portable Shrines.  There are many more — tea festivals, sports day festivals, the black bean (soybean) festival, wild boar festival, as well as street fairs, special markets, and so on.  For a relatively small city, there are certainly a lot of officially organized events.  But this is true for all of Japan.

There’s one activity, however, I’d like to call special attention to.  Because it’s just so darn charming, and so thoroughly Japanese!  That’s the game of Ground Golf that takes place, weather permitting, every day here for six or seven months out of the year.

Not that Ground Golf is Japanese.  I don’t know where the game originated.  Being called ‘golf’ certainly suggests non-Asian roots.

It’s just the idea of it!  As the photo shows at the head of this article, it takes place on a huge flat field of sand.  The city maintains this play area just for Ground Golf.  There’s not much else it could be used for.  Maybe a beach, if climate change causes a 150-meter rise in the level of the ocean.

Why do they have this?  To give old folks something to do and an excuse to socialize.

Can you imagine?

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