Japanese whisky begins with a journey. In 1918, a young chemist named Masataka Taketsuru sailed from Kobe to Glasgow to study organic chemistry at the University of Glasgow. He had been sent by his employer, the Settsu Shuzo distilling company, with an unusual brief: to learn the making of Scotch whisky and bring the knowledge home.
Over the following two years Taketsuru undertook apprenticeships at several Scottish distilleries, filling detailed notebooks with observations on mashing, fermentation, distillation and maturation. He also met and married Rita Cowan, a Scotswoman whose family had taken him in as a lodger. When the couple returned to Japan in 1920, Taketsuru carried with him both a technical education and a personal bridge between two cultures.
The employer that had sent him abroad had by then abandoned its whisky ambitions, and it was Shinjiro Torii, founder of the company that would become Suntory, who recruited Taketsuru to help build Japan's first purpose-designed malt whisky distillery. The site selected was Yamazaki, in the hills between Osaka and Kyoto, where three rivers meet and mist gathers in the mornings — conditions considered auspicious for slow maturation.
He returned with a wife, a chemistry degree, and a way of making spirit that would take a hundred years to be heard.
Yamazaki produced its first spirit in 1924. Taketsuru left Suntory in the 1930s to establish his own distillery at Yoichi on the northern island of Hokkaido, whose cold climate and peaty landscape reminded him of Scotland. From these two houses the industry grew.
For much of the 20th century, Japanese whisky was consumed almost exclusively within Japan, developing its own aesthetics — a preference for balance, subtlety and precision of blending. International recognition arrived only in the early 21st century, when Japanese bottlings began winning major awards abroad and drawing collectors from around the world.
That success, remarkable as it has been, is best understood as the fruit of a century of quiet, disciplined work. Taketsuru's notebooks, still preserved, remain among the most consequential documents in the history of Asian whisky.