Nikka Whisky’s Yoichi Distillery, founded in 1934
Celebrating its 90th anniversary this year, Nikka Whisky – and indeed the entire Japanese whisky category – owes its existence to one man: Masataka Taketsuru. The company’s founder was born in Takehara, Hiroshima, in 1894.
His family had owned a sake brewery since 1733 and he was destined to join the business before he encountered Western-style spirits, while studying fermentation techniques at Osaka Technical School. ‘I want to make this,’ his notes recorded. ‘Once I started thinking that way, I couldn’t resist temptation.’
Young Masataka Taketsuru
Landing a job with spirits producer Settsu Shuzo in Osaka, in 1918, the final year of the First World War, he was sent to Scotland to learn about Scotch whisky. Taketsuru was the first person from Japan ever to do this; at the time it was an arduous journey, taking over 50 days by ship and rail.
Chemistry courses at Glasgow University were followed by short apprenticeships with distilleries including Longmorn in Elgin, Bo’ness – where he learned to distil grain whisky in a Coffey still – and Hazelburn in Campbeltown. The result was a series of notebooks, hand-written and with meticulous diagrams. These ‘Taketsuru Notes’ became Japan’s first manual for whisky production.
Japan’s first whisky
In the wake of the economic turmoil that followed the First World War, Settsu Shuzo abandoned its plans to produce whisky. But Shinjiro Torii of Kotobukiya (later renamed Suntory) had
