The Origins of Japanese Whisky

Japanese whisky is very often described as a young tradition, and in comparison with Scotland or Ireland this is undeniably true. Yet its foundation was laid with such deliberation, and pursued with such patience, that the resulting industry now stands among the most admired in the world.

The story properly begins in 1918, when a young Japanese chemist by the name of Masataka Taketsuru travelled to Scotland to study organic chemistry at the University of Glasgow. Taketsuru's family had run a sake brewery for generations, and he had been sent abroad with a specific commission — to learn the methods of Scottish whisky-making and to bring them home.

During his time in Scotland Taketsuru undertook apprenticeships at the Longmorn distillery in Speyside, at Bo'ness in the Lowlands and at Hazelburn in Campbeltown. He compiled his observations in a set of handwritten notebooks that were later to serve as the practical foundation of the entire Japanese industry. He also married a young Scotswoman, Rita Cowan, who was to return to Japan with him and remain his lifelong companion.

Taketsuru's notebooks, filled in Scottish rain, remain the founding text of an entire industry.

Back in Japan, Taketsuru joined the businessman Shinjiro Torii, who in 1923 founded Japan's first malt whisky distillery at Yamazaki near Kyoto. Yamazaki was chosen for the softness and purity of its water and for the meeting of three rivers that gives the district its particular mist. Taketsuru served as the founding distillery manager and personally oversaw the earliest production.

The partnership between Torii and Taketsuru was not to last. Taketsuru believed that a colder, more northerly climate would produce a whisky closer in character to the great single malts of Scotland, while Torii favoured a lighter, more restrained style better suited to the Japanese palate. In 1934 the two men parted amicably, and Taketsuru moved north to establish his own distillery at Yoichi on the island of Hokkaidō.

The two founding houses — Suntory, from which Yamazaki emerged, and Nikka, which Taketsuru founded — remain the twin pillars of the industry to this day. Between them they have produced the great Japanese whiskies of the modern era: Yamazaki, Hakushu and Hibiki from Suntory; Yoichi, Miyagikyō and the celebrated Nikka blends.

In Japan, blending is not a substitute for the single cask; it is treated as an art in its own right.

What distinguishes Japanese whisky is not any single technical practice but a philosophy. The Japanese tradition treats blending not as a commercial expedient but as the highest expression of the whisky-maker's art. Distilleries maintain a far greater number of stills of different shapes and sizes than would be usual in Scotland, allowing a single site to produce a wide palette of component spirits. The influence of the Mizunara oak, native to Japan and prized for the delicate incense-like character it imparts, has become one of the signatures of the tradition.

In the twenty-first century Japanese whisky has been decorated repeatedly in international competition. Yet the industry retains the reserve, the discipline and the almost ceremonial patience that were carried across the sea in Taketsuru's notebooks a century ago.