Hello Whisky friends,
Japanese whisky offers exceptional drinking, varied and intensely satisfying, with a huge range of blends and single malts to choose room. If you can’t get to the source, here’s the lowdown. Thanks for reading - do consider a subscription to support Whisky Rocks. This one is for my paid subscribers but I’ll be keeping the Tuesday despatch free for now.
A quick bit of history. The Scots might have forged the original blueprint for whisky-making in Japan (we’ll come back to that shortly) but it was the Americans who introduced the drink to the country when, in July 1853, US naval vessels showed up in Tokyo Bay to force open the country after more than 200-year period of self-imposed isolation. In 1871, after the Meiji Restoration, they started importing whisky for foreigners living in Japan. At first, consumption was modest, but after the Anglo-Japanese Alliance was signed in 1902, a large amount of Scotch whisky was imported from England, and it gradually spread to Japan.
In 1923, Japan’s first distillery, the Yamazaki Distillery, developed in Yamazaki, Kyoto, was established. It was founded by Shinjiro Torii and chemistry student turned distillery engineer Masataka Taketsuru – regarded as the founding father of Japanese whisky and the man who brought the craft of whisky-making to Japan from Scotland.
Taketsuru is a fascinating and influential character. He began his whisky apprenticeship in 1918 at the University of Glasgow, where he studied chemistry and engineering. After graduating he opted for a deep dive into Scotch, completing a series of apprenticeships at distilleries across the country. Taketsuru did a five-day crash course in distillation at Longmorn, also studying grain distillation at Glen Grant and spent five months at Hazelburn in Campbeltown. He returned to Japan with all the knowledge he needed. Taketsuru stayed at the Yamazaki distillery for 10 years, before moving on and creating his own company, Nikka, and the Yoichi distillery in 1934.
