Moji Golf Club

Moji Golf Club and the Layout of Its Clubhouse

Moji Golf Club (門司ゴルフ倶楽部, Moji Gorufu Kurabu) is a members' golf club in Kishi, Moji-ku, Kitakyushu City, Fukuoka Prefecture, founded in 1934, whose clubhouse South Building, clubhouse North Building and Start House, all built in 1960, were registered as Registered Tangible Cultural Properties in 2014. Kitakyushu City and the club both describe it as the oldest golf course in Fukuoka Prefecture.

All three buildings came out of the office of the Czech-born architect Antonin Raymond and were built by Takenaka Corporation. The South Building is the main clubhouse, with the entrance, locker rooms, lounge and dining room. The North Building runs parallel to it on the north side and gathers the baths and the caddies' room; the Agency for Cultural Affairs says it is connected to the South Building, and the club's registration notes place the link at the North Building's west end.

The Start House is a small timber building that stands apart from the clubhouse. Measured from the coordinates in the national database, it lies about 70 meters southwest of the South Building. Its roof and walls share the clubhouse's orange-red paint, the color the Japan Institute of Architects (JIA) called vermilion when it praised the way the building stands out among the old pines of the course.

Founding and Postwar Revival of Moji Golf Club

The club's own history dates the first plans for Moji Golf Club to around 1932. Moji was then an international port with sailings to Dalian, Qingdao and Taiwan, and people in shipping and trade wanted a course like the ones in Kobe and Yokohama. A circle of local bank and trading-house managers drew up the scheme and was joined by Idemitsu Sazo, president of the Moji Chamber of Commerce and founder of Idemitsu Kosan, and by the mayor of Moji. Idemitsu went on to serve as the club's first president.

In 1933 the Matsugae area was chosen as the site, and the course design was entrusted to Ueda Osamu. A nine-hole course opened the following year, 1934, with a thatched-roof clubhouse. Overseas travel still meant long sea voyages, so the club handed visitor cards to the captains and pursers of ocean liners, letting passengers who called at Moji play a round whenever they came ashore.

The war turned the fairways into potato fields and the clubhouse into barracks. In 1949 the commander of the US Army's 24th Division urged that the course be revived, and the club voted to restore it; Army engineers did the earthwork with bulldozers, then a rare sight in Japan. Play resumed on nine holes in 1950, and the thatched clubhouse was put back into use.

Commissioning the Moji Golf Club Clubhouse

The present Moji Golf Club clubhouse was completed in 1960, the year after the club's 25th anniversary; the JIA award documents give the completion date as June 1960. Before commissioning it, the club set down seven principles. Among them were avoiding luxury, keeping the flow through the building practical, building to resist fire, providing proper facilities for staff, respecting the Matsugae setting and keeping something of the first clubhouse's character.

The commission went to Raymond's firm. Raymond, born in Bohemia in 1888, had come to Japan in 1919 with Frank Lloyd Wright to build the Imperial Hotel and stayed on to practice for decades. The club's third president explained the choice in writing: Raymond was a golfer of long standing who had designed the prewar clubhouse of the Tokyo Golf Club at Asaka, and he was known for exacting supervision on site.

According to a review by the Building and Equipment Long-life Cycle Association (BELCA), the president asked for a concrete building that would not be easily torn down, and Raymond responded by proposing to put a pitched roof over it. The president is said to have traveled as far as St Andrews in Scotland to study clubhouses. The result follows British practice: the dining room and lounge are not divided, and more floor space goes to conversation than to dining.

The clubhouse won the BELCA Award in the Long Life category for fiscal 1998 and the JIA 25-Year Award for fiscal 2012. The Council for Cultural Affairs recommended its registration on March 18, 2014, and the three buildings were registered on October 7, 2014.

The Three Registered Buildings of Moji Golf Club

The three Moji Golf Club buildings carry consecutive registration numbers, 40-0111 through 40-0113, and all were registered as structures that serve as a model of design. The national database dates every one of them to 1960.

• Moji Golf Club Clubhouse South Building: 2-storey reinforced concrete, sheet-iron roof, building area 1257 square meters. The main clubhouse, with entrance, locker rooms, lounge and dining room
• Moji Golf Club Clubhouse North Building: single-storey reinforced concrete with a partial basement, sheet-iron roof, building area 434 square meters. The service block with baths, caddies' room and staff canteen
• Moji Golf Club Start House: single-storey timber, sheet-iron roof, building area 33 square meters. Two waiting rooms flanking a central office

The registration notes the club publishes sum up the group in two points. Every structural member that would normally be hidden behind finishes is left on view as part of the design, so each material shows what it is and what it does. And reinforced concrete, a Western method, is paired with Japanese means such as a timber roof frame and paper shoji screens, an approach the notes say cannot be found in prewar buildings and read as Raymond's postwar test of what modern architecture could become.

Visiting Moji Golf Club

Moji Golf Club is a private members' club, and its official site states that play requires a member's company or introduction (as of October 2026). Neither the club nor Kitakyushu City announces any public opening or tour of the three buildings, so expect the interiors to be open only to people using the course. The club publishes no rules on photography; if you hope to take pictures inside, ask when you book.

The course is closed on Mondays, or on the following day when a Monday is a public or substitute holiday. Between March and December, and on weekends and holidays in January and February, the gates open at 7:00 a.m. and the first tee time is 8:00 a.m. On weekdays in January and February both are an hour later, at 8:00 a.m. and 9:00 a.m. Bookings are taken by phone or fax.

There is no club shuttle bus. The club's access page gives taxi times of about 25 minutes (about 3,500 yen) from JR Moji Station, about 40 minutes (about 4,000 yen) from Kokura Station on the Shinkansen line, and about 40 minutes (about 6,000 yen) from Kitakyushu Airport. By car the club is about 4 kilometers from the Shin-Moji interchange and about 6 kilometers from the Kokura-Higashi interchange on the Kyushu Expressway, or about 6 kilometers from the Nagano exit of the Kitakyushu Urban Expressway.

One note on records: the national database gives the address of Moji Golf Club as 175-10 Hiebata, Kishi, while Kitakyushu City and the club use 175 Kishi. The database names the owner as an incorporated association (shadan hojin); the club now calls itself a general incorporated association (ippan shadan hojin).