The story of Japanese whisky begins not in Japan but in Scotland. In 1918, a young chemist named Masataka Taketsuru travelled to Glasgow with the ambition of learning the craft of whisky-making and bringing it home to his native country. Over the following two years he studied chemistry at the University of Glasgow and apprenticed at three distilleries — Longmorn on Speyside, Bo'ness in the Lowlands, and Hazelburn in Campbeltown — filling notebooks with meticulous observations of every stage of production.
He also married a Scottish woman, Rita Cowan, and returned home with both a wife and a manuscript that would become the foundation of an entire national industry.
Yamazaki and the first Japanese distillery
In Osaka, Taketsuru was hired by the ambitious entrepreneur Shinjiro Torii, founder of the company we now know as Suntory. Torii dreamed of producing a whisky that would suit the Japanese palate, and in 1923 the two men established Japan's first commercial malt whisky distillery at Yamazaki, in a valley outside Kyoto whose waters were famed for their purity.
Every drop of Japanese whisky is, in a sense, an inheritance of that first journey between Scotland and Japan.
A distinct philosophy takes shape
Taketsuru later founded his own company, Nikka, and built a distillery at Yoichi on the northern island of Hokkaido, choosing the location for its climatic similarity to Scotland. Between them, Suntory and Nikka established the twin poles of the Japanese whisky industry — one drawing inspiration from the Highlands, the other from the coastal Scottish style.
Over the following decades a distinctly Japanese philosophy emerged, one that prized delicacy, balance and precision. Japanese distillers experimented with Mizunara — a native Japanese oak — for maturation, and developed a tradition of blending that emphasises composition over strength.
Global recognition
For much of the twentieth century, Japanese whisky was little known outside its home market. That changed in the early 2000s, when a series of international awards drew attention to what Japanese distillers had quietly been achieving. Today Japanese whisky is regarded as one of the finest categories in the world — a hundred years young, and drawing on a philosophy that is very much its own.