Brother Nakamura

Brother Nakamura was born into a merchant family in Kobe, a port city where the sea and the city collided in a perpetual motion of ships, goods, and men moving in and out of Japan. His father traded in textiles; his uncles in rubber and iron. The Nakamaras were not wealthy, but they understood the language of routes, seasons, and the kind of men who made money by being present at the right moment with the right introduction. Masao Nakamura, as he was born, learned early that port cities speak a universal language: the currency of trust, built one drink and one story at a time.

Golf came late to Japan, but when it came, it came with urgency. By the 1920s and 1930s, as Japan's empire expanded and Western things were simultaneously celebrated and suspected, golf became a peculiar badge: a sign of modernity, cosmopolitanism, and access to the new world. Nakamura, now working as a shipping agent for a trading house, found himself moving between Kobe's growing golf clubs and the tighter circles of diplomats, military men, and traders who were reshaping Japan's relationship with the wider world.

He played golf with modest skill but exceptional grace. More importantly, he understood something that few others grasped during those turbulent decades: that in times of rapid change and political upheaval, a place where men could gather after their rounds – where rank and official titles could briefly be set aside – became invaluable. He began to move between the clubs, introducing players to one another, ensuring that the ritual of the 19th hole did not become merely a Western imposition but something that could grow roots in Japanese soil, adapted to Japanese customs.

When the war came, and Japan's golf clubs either shut or were repurposed, Nakamura's quiet work kept something alive. Through the 1940s, even as the country collapsed and rebuilt, he maintained friendships with men on both sides – Japanese officers, American occupation soldiers, merchants trying to survive – and in the few moments when they could meet without suspicion, he preserved the custom. A shared drink after a round, he insisted in his gentle way, was not a political act. It was simply an old tradition, older than empires, that said a man's true character emerges not on the course but in the room afterward.

After the war, as Japan rebuilt and new courses opened, Nakamura – now in his forties – became something between a ghost and a legend. He moved frequently between Kobe and Shanghai, following the routes that merchants and diplomats travelled as trade reopened between Asia and the West. In Shanghai, he found a fractured golfing community trying to rebuild after occupation and revolution. In Kobe, he witnessed the birth of new courses and the cautious return of foreign golfers.

In both places, he did the same work: maintaining small rooms, quiet tables, and the unwritten understanding that a golfer who played with honour would find a place to finish their round among friends, regardless of politics, nationality, or the wars swirling outside. He kept a ledger – in his head, mostly – of who had played with whom, which introductions had taken root, and how the 19th hole custom was beginning to sound, in small ways, like something genuinely Japanese rather than merely imported.

By the time Nakamura died in 1988, Japanese golf had exploded into a global phenomenon. Courses were everywhere. Millions played. Television broadcast tournaments to audiences that had never held a club. But within the Order, Nakamura is remembered for something simpler and more profound: he proved that the customs of the 19th hole could survive war, occupation, revolution, and cultural rupture. More than that – he showed that in the most fractured and uncertain times, a good 19th hole became a lifeline, a place where the future could be quietly negotiated long before history officially permitted it. His legacy is that the Order did not disappear from East Asia. It went underground, patient and steady, waiting for the world to be ready to gather again.