In December 1918 a young Japanese chemist named Masataka Taketsuru arrived in Glasgow. He had been sent by his employer, a Osaka trading company, with an unusually specific brief: to learn how Scotch whisky was made and to bring that knowledge home. He enrolled at the University of Glasgow, apprenticed at distilleries in Speyside and Campbeltown, and filled two notebooks with detailed observations of equipment, procedure and measurement.
Those notebooks, which survive, are among the most valuable primary documents in the history of whisky. They record not a general impression but a working manual — still dimensions, fermentation times, temperatures and the reasoning behind them.
Yamazaki, 1923
Taketsuru returned to a Japan in the midst of rapid industrial modernisation. He was recruited by Shinjiro Torii, a merchant who had built a business importing and blending wines, and who intended to establish domestic whisky production. In 1923 they built Japan's first malt whisky distillery at Yamazaki, in a valley near Kyoto where three rivers meet and where the quality of the water had been recognised for centuries.
The two men differed on approach. Taketsuru favoured a location resembling Scotland in climate; Torii chose proximity to the population centres of Osaka and Kyoto. Taketsuru eventually left to establish his own distillery at Yoichi in Hokkaido in 1934, on the northern island whose cold, damp maritime conditions he considered closest to those of Scotland.
Two founders, two philosophies, and the entire structure of the Japanese industry descends from the disagreement between them.
A separate technical tradition
One structural difference shaped Japanese production decisively. In Scotland, distilleries have long traded new-make spirit with one another, allowing blenders to draw on hundreds of component whiskies. Japanese companies did not do this. Each producer therefore had to generate its full range of components internally.
The consequence is visible in any Japanese still house: multiple still shapes and sizes operating side by side, varied fermentation regimes, different yeast strains and an unusually wide spread of cask types. Where a Scottish distillery typically pursues a single consistent character, a Japanese distillery is designed to produce many.
Mizunara and wartime necessity
Japanese oak, mizunara, entered the maturation repertoire not by design but by necessity. During and after the Second World War, imported casks were unavailable and producers turned to domestic timber. Mizunara is porous, prone to leaking and difficult to coopers to work, and its use was initially regarded as a compromise. Over decades of maturation it was found to contribute a distinctive character, and it is now used deliberately and sparingly.
The broader philosophy that developed across the century emphasises balance, restraint and the precise assembly of components — principles frequently connected by commentators to other Japanese craft disciplines. Whether that connection is causal or interpretive is debated, but the technical record is unambiguous: Japanese whisky began as a study of Scotland and became something the Scottish industry had not attempted.
Labelling standards introduced in recent years now require that mashing, fermentation, distillation, maturation and bottling all take place within Japan for a product to be described as Japanese whisky, resolving a long period of ambiguity in the category's definition.