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How Hideki Matsuyama’s Masters win could revive golf’s popularity in Japan
Hideki Matsuyama may instantly have risen to the greatest golfing hero Japan has ever known with Sunday’s roller-coaster ride Masters win. Now, however, comes the hard part.Because as challenging as closing the deal on becoming the first Japanese-born male golfer to win a major championship clearly was during Sunday’s frenetic finish, now the shy, workman-like Matsuyama stands at the forefront of what one long-time Japanese golf business observer called “an epoch-making event.”
Japan may comfortably stand as the world’s second largest golf market, accounting for a fifth of the global golf business all by itself, but it is long removed from the country’s golf boom of the late 1980s and ‘90s. With the last decade seeing flat revenues and declining play and players, Matsuyama’s win is an opportunity to inject new life in a nation that has been waiting for a golf moment like this for more than half a century.

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