C
locksabovethereceptionatSingapore
IslandCountryClubshowthehourin
Augusta,Georgia,andStAndrewsinScot-
land—bothplaceswithfamouslywonder-
fulgolfcourses.Buttimemayberunning
shortforgolfinSingapore. Thegovern-
mentisforcingsomecoursestoshrinkor
close.Greenswillgivewaytocranes;irons
toconcreteandsteel.
Golfinthecity-statehashadpowerful
champions.LeeKuanYew,Singapore’sfirst
prime minister, loved it. (Golf was his
“principalrecreationandpassion,”saidhis
son,LeeHsienYang,in2015.)Theroyaland
ancientgamewasoncea symbolofmiddle-
classaspiration,saysHarveyNeo,a geogra-
pherattheLeeKuanYewCentreforInno-
vativeCities.Duringthe1990sand2000s
Singaporeansweresaidtocovetthe“5cs”:
cash,car,condominium,creditcardandcountry-club membership.
Yet in 2013 the government, which owns
most of the land in Singapore, announced
that it would gradually reallocate much of
the space taken up by golf courses to public
housing and infrastructure. The ruling
party, stung by its disappointing perfor-
mance at elections in 2011, felt it needed to
respond to critics who said that it was out
of touch with ordinary Singaporeans and
who argued that it had overcrowded the
tiny island by welcoming too many immi-
grants. At the time of its announcement
2.1% of Singapore’s land was given over to
greens and fairways. By 2030 the number of
courses is expected to fall by 40% or so
from its peak in 2010. Closures are expected
to leave Singapore with one course for ev-
ery 430,000 residents by 2040, down from
one for every 250,000 three decades ago.
Many Singaporeans shrug. The game’s
grip on the national imagination is weak-
ening. The number of people who play reg-
ularly has not much changed for years,
thinks Jerome Ng, general manager of the
Singapore Golf Association. Some 55% of
golf-club members are 55 or older. “Young
people are now into other sports,” says Lee
Lee Langdale, who brokers country-club
memberships. She says youngsters are put
off by the exorbitant cost. Some clubs
charge hundreds of thousands of dollars
just to join. Garish clothes aren’t cheap, ei-
ther. The game’s image has suffered. One
banker says that he sometimes feels “self-
conscious” admitting that he is a golfer.
It will be possible to play golf in Singa-
pore for years to come. But the government
has yet to renew the lease of any club be-
yond 2040, which worries enthusiasts.
“We will lose everything,” says Ms Lang-
dale. Others are sanguine. “The people we
used to play with are either dead or not
playing any more,” says Aidan Wong, who
has been swinging irons since he was 12.
When his club closes in 2021, he says, “I will
probably put my clubs away.” 7SINGAPORE
DemandforlandinSingaporeisbad
newsforgolfersSingaporeFromfairway
tohighway
Drivetoday,trafficjamtomorrow30 Asia The EconomistAugust 1st 2020
2 “land, sea and air forces”. Japan in fact
maintains powerful military forces; Mr
Abe wants to make explicit that they are
constitutional, and to stretch the limits to
what they can do. He has not convinced the
public: support for altering Article 9 has
fallen from 33% in 2013 to 26% this year.
Still, he has increased defence spending,
pleasing America.
As Hiroshima and Nagasaki prepare for
their anniversaries, politicians in Tokyo
have been debating whether to acquire
weapons that would enable the country
pre-emptively to strike missile bases and
other facilities of enemies who may be pre-
paring to attack it. Many hibakushaare
aghast. “As we look stronger, it will invite
potential attackers to attack earlier,” Mr Yu-
zaki argues. “We have to be very careful.”
Globally, non-proliferation efforts are
faltering. In January the Bulletin of Atomic
Scientists moved its Doomsday Clock, a
subjective measure of humanity’s proxim-
ity to self-annihilation, closer to midnight
than at any time since its establishment in- Donald Trump has withdrawn Ameri-
ca from the Iran nuclear deal and the Inter-
mediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (after
accusing Russia of cheating). Hibakusha
are pleased that 82 countries have signed a
Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weap-
ons, created in 2017. It invokes their “unac-
ceptable suffering” in its preamble. Yet no
country with nuclear weapons has signed
up to it. Nor has Japan, which shelters un-
der America’s nuclear umbrella. Mr Yuzaki
regrets that Japan has not used its moral
authority as the only victim of atomic
weapons to push harder for their abolition.
The hibakushaworried about amnesia
even while the rubble was being cleared.
“As Hiroshima recovers, the memory of the
devastation is fading from people’s minds,”
Kimura Kazuo, a college student, wrote in
his diary in 1946. Yet equally troubling for
some in Japan, and for many in the rest of
Asia, is the selectivity of Japanese wartime
memory. Hiroshima and Nagasaki’s muse-
ums emphasise Japanese suffering but
downplay the war that precipitated it.
Hiroshima became central to Japanese
wartime memory in part because it “allows
the victim narrative to dominate”, rather
than the atrocities Japanese soldiers com-
mitted abroad, argues Fujiwara Kiichi of
the University of Tokyo. Both museums
place materials about Japan’s aggression in
China and the Pacific at the end of their ex-
hibitions. One section at the Nagasaki mu-
seum entitled “Events Leading up to the
Nagasaki Atomic Bombing” begins by de-
tailing American discussions in 1943 about
which places in Japan to target. The Hiro-
shima museum makes scant mention of
foreign nationals who perished during the
bombing, such as the tens of thousands of
Korean victims, most of them forced la-
bourers.
Yet Hiroshima’s messages are powerful,
and preserving its stories is essential. Mr
Takigawa speaks of creating “an everlasting
museum”. The denshosha programme is
part of that effort. Volunteers go through
three years of study, training and discus-
sion with hibakushabefore being certified
to talk in public. There are now 150 practis-
ing denshosha, with another 197 in training.
Nagasaki’s programme has 83 participants.
Anti-nuclear activists have long called for
the bomb to be abolished before the last hi-
bakushapasses away. That is unlikely. But
their stories may deter the world from ever
using it again. 7