Current Pro Men’s Golfers from Japan (PGA 2023)

Golfers, and athletes of all sports really, take pride in where they’re from. Whether it’s the state, city or area code – you always notice players wanting to rep their home area.

The whole Ryder Cup is basically built on the principle of competing and representing where you’re from.

Fans tend to do the same thing. It’s always more fun to pull for a player when they’re from your home state (or even your hometown).

With all that in mind, we went through the World Golf Rankings and pulled the home states (or countries) of every player in the top 200 (as of 5/19/23).

There are 28 countries (29 including the US) with at least one player representing them in the top 200.

Japan is one of those countries. In fact, Japan has 12 players in the top 200, third most of any country outside the US (behind England with 15 and South Africa with 13).

Men’s Golf Pros from Japan

Here are the 12 golfers from Japan in the World Golf Rankings top 200 in the spring of 2023 including what town they’re from.

Name	City
Hideki Matsuyama	Ehime
Hiroshi Iwata	Miyagi
Kazuki Higa	Okinawa
Mikumu Horikawa	Kanagawa
Rikuya Hoshino	Ibaraki
Ryo Hisatsune	Okayama
Shugo Imahira	Saitama
Taiga Semikawa	Hyogo
Takumi Kanaya	Hiroshima
Tomoharu Otsuki	Ibaraki
Yuki Inamori	Kagoshima
Yuto Katsuragawa	Kiyosu

Hall of Fame Golfers from Japan

My assumption is anyone interested in the current golf pros from Japan might also be interested to see which golfers from Japan have gone onto the World Golf Hall of Fame.

So, here are the two guys that have done exactly that:

Name	City	Induction Year
Masashi “Jumbo” Ozaki	Kaifu District, Tokushima	2011
Isao Aoki	Abiko, Chiba	2004

Golf Hometown Fun Facts

England has the most players in the top 200 of any country outside the US. They’re followed by South Africa (13), Japan (12) and South Korea and Australia with 9 each.

To give you some context to how that compares to US States – California has the most golfers of any state in the top 200 with 21. Second most is Texas with 8, followed by Florida (7), and North Carolina and South Carolina with 5 each.