Of all the cultural phenomena that marked the bubble era of 1980s Japan, none was more economically significant than the rise of golf. Despite its relatively small land area, Japan boasts the third largest number of golf courses in the world — 2,442 as of 2008, which accounts for 7 percent of the earth's total (the U.S., number one, has 50 percent, with the U.K. a distant second with 8 percent).
The majority of these courses were built before 1990, when land prices were at their highest. However, what really demonstrated the profligacy of the time wasn't so much the insane number of courses in a country where 70 percent of the land is mountainous, but the practice of investing in golf memberships. The "bubble," of course, refers to the artificially high valuation of real estate and securities during this time, a situation that extended to almost anything that attracted investment, including golf memberships, which could be brokered as if they were stocks or bonds. Many people who had no interest at all in golf as a pastime bought golf club memberships simply as an investment.
As with all investments made during a bubble period, people who bought them got burned. According to the Kanto Golf Membership Trading Industry Association, the average price of a golf club membership in the seven prefectures that make up the greater metropolitan area in and around Tokyo rose from ¥5 million in 1980 to almost ¥50 million in 1990 and then dropped to ¥2.5 million in 2003. The price spiked briefly in 2006 at ¥5 million before plummeting to ¥1.45 in early 2012. However, it has risen slightly since then and is now around ¥1.8 million.