Japanese whisky exists because a sake brewer’s son spent two years in Scotland and wrote everything down. Masataka Taketsuru’s notebooks from 1919 and 1920 — closely written, illustrated with sketches of stills and worm tubs, recording malting times and fermentation temperatures at distilleries that let him in — were the foundation of the first Japanese malt distillery and, when he left it, of the second. He is called the father of Japanese whisky, and for once the title is not marketing. Both of the country’s great houses descend from him directly.
The sake family
Taketsuru was born in 1894 in Takehara, a town near Hiroshima, into a family that had brewed sake since the 1730s. He was expected to take over the brewery and was sent to study brewing chemistry at Osaka Technical High School. There he became interested in Western spirits, and in 1916, instead of returning to the family business, he joined Settsu Shuzo, an Osaka drinks company that made imitation whisky from neutral spirit and flavouring and wanted to make the real thing.
In 1918 the company sent him to Scotland to find out how. He was twenty-four, spoke serviceable English, and had never seen a whisky distillery.
Glasgow and the apprenticeships
He enrolled at the University of Glasgow to study organic chemistry and, between terms, went looking for distilleries that would take him. Most would not; the industry was secretive and a foreign chemist asking detailed questions was not welcome. The first to say yes was Longmorn in Speyside, where he spent a week in April 1919 working in every part of the process and filling pages with notes. The Longmorn page records the connection, which Nikka still honours. He then spent time at a grain distillery at Bo’ness on the Forth, learning column distillation, and in 1920 — the most important period — several months at Hazelburn in Campbeltown, then one of the largest malt distilleries in Scotland. The Hazelburn page covers the distillery, long closed, whose name Springbank now uses.
At Hazelburn he worked as a full apprentice, from the malt floor to the stillhouse, and the notebooks from that period are the most detailed. Peter Innes, the distillery’s owner, let him record everything. Our guide to fermentation and distillation describes the processes he was documenting, which have changed less in a century than one might expect.
Rita
While in Glasgow he lodged with the family of a doctor in Kirkintilloch and taught judo to the son of the house. The son’s sister, Jessie Roberta Cowan, known as Rita, taught him English. They married in January 1920, in a Glasgow registry office, over the objections of both families, and when Taketsuru returned to Japan that year she went with him. She learned Japanese, adopted Japanese dress, and for the rest of her life was the only Scottish woman in whatever town they lived in. The marriage is the human centre of the story and, in 2014, the subject of a hugely popular Japanese television drama, Massan, which did more for Nikka’s sales than any advertising campaign.
Yamazaki
Taketsuru came home to find that Settsu Shuzo, hit by the post-war recession, had abandoned its whisky plans. He taught chemistry for two years. Then, in 1923, Shinjiro Torii of Kotobukiya — the company that became Suntory — hired him to build Japan’s first malt distillery.
The two disagreed from the start about where. Taketsuru wanted a cold, northern site that resembled the Highlands; Torii, who was paying, wanted somewhere near Osaka for distribution and chose Yamazaki, between Kyoto and Osaka, where three rivers met in a humid valley. Taketsuru designed the distillery, ordered the stills, hired and trained the staff and ran it. The first spirit flowed in 1924, and the first Japanese whisky, Suntory Shirofuda (“White Label”), was released in 1929. It was heavily peated, in the Campbeltown style he had learned, and it did not sell; the Japanese market found it too smoky. The Yamazaki page covers the distillery he built and the lighter style it later adopted.
The split
Taketsuru’s ten-year contract with Kotobukiya ended in 1934, and he left. The reasons were partly temperamental — he was a distiller, Torii was a salesman, and the smoky whisky’s failure had strained things — and partly ambition. He wanted his own distillery, in the place he had wanted all along.
He found it at Yoichi, on the west coast of Hokkaido, Japan’s northern island: cold, damp, with peat bogs nearby, a river of soft water, and a climate that reminded him of Scotland. He raised money from investors to found Dai Nippon Kaju, “the Great Japan Juice Company”, which sold apple juice while the whisky matured. The company’s name was later shortened to Nikka. The first Nikka whisky was released in 1940. The Yoichi page covers the distillery, which still heats its stills with coal fires, as Taketsuru learned at Hazelburn, and makes a robust, peaty, maritime whisky that is the closest thing in Japan to the Campbeltown of 1920.
Miyagikyo and the second distillery
In 1969, aged seventy-five, Taketsuru opened a second distillery at Miyagikyo, near Sendai in the north of Honshu, in a wooded valley at the confluence of two rivers. He chose the site, the story goes, by tasting the river water. Miyagikyo was built to make a softer, fruitier spirit as a counterpart to Yoichi’s weight, following the logic Suntory would later apply with Hakushu — variety within one company, for blending. The Miyagikyo page covers it.
Rita died in 1961. Taketsuru died in 1979, at eighty-five, and was buried beside her on a hill above Yoichi, looking toward the sea.
The Coffey still and the apple juice
Two details from the Nikka years show the man’s stubbornness. In 1962 Taketsuru imported a Coffey still — the nineteenth-century continuous column design he had studied at Bo’ness in 1919 — and installed it first at Nishinomiya and later at Miyagikyo, to make grain whisky for Nikka’s blends. Most of the world’s grain distillers had moved on to more efficient modern columns; Taketsuru wanted the older design because it left more character in the spirit. Nikka’s Coffey Grain and Coffey Malt whiskies, made on that equipment today, are among the most distinctive in Japan, and the choice is pure Taketsuru: the authentic method, however inconvenient.
The apple juice is the other story. Dai Nippon Kaju’s juice business, which was supposed to fund the distillery while the whisky matured, failed almost immediately — the juice was unsweetened and too sour for Japanese tastes — and the company nearly went under before a bottle of whisky had been sold. It was saved by apple brandy, apple wine and, eventually, the whisky itself. The juice is remembered only in the company’s old name, and in the “Nikka” that was shortened from it.
What he built
The two companies that make most of Japan’s whisky are both his. Suntory’s Yamazaki was designed and run by him for a decade; Nikka’s Yoichi and Miyagikyo were his own. The Japanese approach — Scottish method, Japanese attention, multiple spirit styles under one roof, a blender’s mentality — is his approach. The Japan region page traces the industry that grew from it.
His notebooks are preserved at Nikka’s headquarters and have been displayed at the Yoichi distillery. They remain, a century on, the most complete record of how whisky was made in Scotland in 1920, written by a Japanese chemist who had come a very long way to ask. Our tasting notes on whiskies from both his distilleries are collected in the reviews as we publish them, and Yoichi in particular still tastes, in the right light, of the Campbeltown he never forgot.
