How Japan Took On Scotland - and Changed Whisky Forever

There is a recurring story in twentieth century economic history that Japan keeps telling, in industry after industry, and that the rest of the world keeps being surprised by.

It goes like this. A Japanese company - or in some cases a Japanese individual - studies a Western craft with extraordinary seriousness, learns it as thoroughly as any practitioner in the country of its origin, and then does something the originators did not expect: they take the craft seriously enough to improve it. Not to approximate it. Not to produce a cheaper version. To understand it so completely that they can eventually surpass it on its own terms, and then go further in a direction the originators never imagined.

You can read this story in cars. Toyota arrived in the global market as a curiosity and became the world’s largest automaker, not by abandoning engineering principles but by applying them with a rigour that Western manufacturers found unnecessary until it was too late to catch up. You can read it in watches. Seiko began by studying Swiss watchmaking, trained its engineers to meet and then exceed Swiss chronometer standards, and in 1969 released the Astron - the world’s first commercially available quartz wristwatch - a technology that Switzerland had actually developed two years earlier and then dismissed as a novelty. ¹ By 1980, two-thirds of Swiss watchmaking jobs had been eliminated. The Swiss call the period “the Quartz Crisis.” The Japanese call it “the Quartz Revolution.” ² The difference in naming tells you everything about perspective.

And you can read it in whisky.

I collect watches - a passion I will return to in a future series of Devon Drams articles, because the demographics of serious watch collecting and serious whisky collecting overlap in ways that are not accidental - and the more time I spend with both, the more clearly I see the same cultural logic at work. Japan takes something from the West, understands it better than the West does, and gives it back transformed. Whether it is the movement inside a Grand Seiko or the liquid inside a Yamazaki, the fingerprints of the same national temperament are visible: precision, patience, the belief that mastery is a moral as much as a practical category.

This is the story of how that happened with whisky.

The Man Who Went to Scotland

In the winter of 1918, a twenty-four-year-old Japanese chemist named Masataka Taketsuru arrived in Glasgow with a notebook and a mission.

He had come from a sake-brewing family in Hiroshima - the Taketsurus had been making fermented drinks since 1733 - and had been sent to Scotland by a Japanese drinks company called Settsu Shuzo with a specific brief: to learn how Scotch whisky was made, and to bring the knowledge back. He enrolled at the University of Glasgow to study organic chemistry, and then apprenticed at three Scottish distilleries: Longmorn in Speyside, James Calder’s facility in Bo’ness in the Lowlands, and Hazelburn in Campbeltown. ³ He took meticulous notes throughout - what would later be called the “Taketsuru Notes” are now considered among the most important documents in the history of Japanese whisky - recording not just the technical processes but the philosophy behind them: why certain cuts were made, why certain still shapes produced certain characters, why the specific terroir of Speyside or Campbeltown produced spirits of such distinct and unrepeatable character.

He also, at a party on Christmas Day 1919 at the home of a Glaswegian family called the Cowans, found a silver coin in his Christmas pudding. A young Scotswoman named Jessie Roberta Cowan found a thimble in hers. According to tradition, the man with the coin and the woman with the thimble are destined to marry. Whether or not either of them believed in tradition quite that straightforwardly, they were married at the Glasgow registry office on the 8th of January, 1920, against the opposition of both families, with only Rita’s sister and a friend as witnesses. ⁴

Rita Cowan - who adopted the name Rita Taketsuru - followed her husband to Japan and spent the rest of her life there, giving English and piano lessons to make ends meet while Masataka’s first whisky was maturing, enduring social hostility and accusations of espionage during the Second World War because she was British and Japan had sided against the Allies, and remaining by his side through four decades of determination, poverty, gradual recognition, and eventual triumph. She is remembered in Japan as the Mother of Japanese Whisky. Masataka released a special blended expression in her honour when she died in 1961. He was buried beside her on a hillside overlooking the distillery they had built together in Hokkaido. ⁵

It is one of the great love stories in the history of spirits, and it is also a story about what genuine commitment to craft looks like.

Two Visions, One Country

The complexity of Japanese whisky’s origin is that it did not begin as a single story. It began as two, and the tension between them is what gave the category its character.

When Taketsuru returned from Scotland in 1920, his employer Settsu Shuzo abandoned their whisky project for financial reasons. He eventually joined a company called Kotobukiya - later renamed Suntory - run by a man named Shinjiro Torii, and helped build what became Japan’s first commercial whisky distillery at Yamazaki, just outside Osaka, which opened in 1924. ⁶

Torii and Taketsuru had fundamentally different ideas about what Japanese whisky should be. Torii believed the spirit should be adapted to the Japanese palate - lighter, less peaty, suited to the food culture and the climate of the country it was made in. When the first Suntory expression was released in 1929, it was heavily peated in the Scottish style that Taketsuru had mastered, and the Japanese public found it too assertive. The breakthrough came with a subsequent release that dialled back the peat and introduced a lighter, more approachable profile - and that tension between Scottish authenticity and Japanese adaptation remained the creative engine of Suntory’s development for decades.

Taketsuru, after a ten-year contract with Suntory, disagreed with this direction fundamentally. He believed that the path to greatness was not adaptation but fidelity - not making whisky that suited the Japanese palate, but making whisky so good that the Japanese palate would come to appreciate what he was doing. In 1934, he founded his own company on the northern island of Hokkaido, in a coastal community called Yoichi whose cool, peaty, maritime conditions he considered the closest thing in Japan to the Campbeltown and Speyside landscapes where he had trained. ⁷ He set up pot stills heated by direct coal fire - a method already falling out of fashion in Scotland - because he believed it produced the right character. He was so committed to Scottish authenticity that he adopted the Scottish spelling convention, writing “whisky” without the “e.”

He called his company Nikka. While his first whisky was maturing, he sold apple juice from local Hokkaido orchards to pay the bills, and Rita gave lessons to the neighbours.

His first whisky was released in 1940, as the Second World War began. It was, by all accounts, remarkable.

The Philosophical Split That Shaped Everything

The difference between Suntory and Nikka is not simply a difference between two companies. It is a difference in philosophy that gave Japanese whisky its range.

Suntory - now home to Yamazaki, Hakushu, and the Hibiki blended range - developed a style rooted in delicacy, subtlety, and the adaptation of Scottish tradition to Japanese sensibility. The Yamazaki distillery uses an extraordinary variety of still sizes and shapes, and matures spirit in an equally diverse range of casks - including mizunara oak, whose extraordinary character we explored in Part Two of The Wood Series - to produce a palette of individual spirits that the blender can combine with a precision that the Scottish tradition rarely attempts. ⁸

Nikka - now producing single malts from both Yoichi on the northern coast and Miyagikyo in the river valleys of Miyagi - maintained Taketsuru’s commitment to Scottish methods while developing its own identity through the contrast between its two distilleries: Yoichi, peated and coastal, distilled over direct coal fire; Miyagikyo, clean and elegant, surrounded by forests and mountain water, distilled by steam heat. The resulting range is broader than almost any single Scottish distillery could produce from one location.

Both approaches proved to be right. What neither Torii nor Taketsuru could have known in the 1920s and 1930s was that the most celebrated quality of Japanese whisky - its precision of balance, its ability to hold multiple flavour elements in a relationship of apparent effortlessness - would emerge precisely from the interaction of these two visions operating in parallel, competing and improving against each other for decades.

The Moment the World Noticed

For most of the twentieth century, Japanese whisky was considered a category to itself - well-made, widely consumed domestically, but not a serious competitor to Scotch on the international stage. The Japanese were thought of in the whisky world much as they had been thought of in the watch world before Seiko: capable of producing something technically accomplished, but working in a tradition that was ultimately derivative.

Then, in 2001, Nikka’s Yoichi single malt was named the world’s Best of the Best in an international blind tasting organised by Whisky Magazine - the first time a non-Scottish whisky had ever received the honour. ⁹ The result was treated with some scepticism. In 2003, Yamazaki 12 won the award for best single malt at the International Spirits Challenge. Then Karuizawa, a now-closed Japanese distillery, began appearing at the top of independent critics’ rankings. Then the Yamazaki 18 began winning against the finest Speyside expressions in successive competition years.

The whisky world had not been watching. Japan had been quietly doing what it always does: learning, refining, mastering, and then producing something that the originators of the tradition had not thought to try.

It is worth pausing on this parallel with Grand Seiko. In 1960, Seiko launched a luxury wristwatch line with an explicit brief: to produce a timepiece that met or exceeded Swiss chronometer standards in accuracy. The first Grand Seiko watches came with a certificate of accuracy - every piece tested against the Swiss standard before leaving the factory. ¹⁰ Not approximately. Not close enough. Exactly meeting the standard that Switzerland had set, and then moving beyond it. By 2017, when Grand Seiko was established as an independent brand, it was producing movements that serious collectors considered comparable to anything from Geneva or the Vallée de Joux - not copies, not approximations, but a distinctly Japanese aesthetic vision expressed through watchmaking of the highest technical order.

The Spring Drive movement - Grand Seiko’s most celebrated innovation - is a genuinely original contribution to horology: a hybrid that combines the mechanical mainspring of a traditional watch with an electromagnetic brake regulated by a quartz oscillator, achieving quartz-level accuracy without a battery. ¹¹ It is something that no Swiss manufacturer had produced. It emerged from decades of taking the Swiss tradition more seriously than Switzerland did.

Yamazaki’s 18-year-old expression winning blind against Speyside’s finest is the whisky equivalent of that story. And the mechanism behind both achievements is the same: obsessive attention, sustained over decades, in a tradition that the originators had become comfortable enough to treat as settled.

The Reckoning: Scarcity, Authenticity, and the New Wave

The global explosion of interest in Japanese whisky after the mid-2000s created a crisis that the industry is still navigating.

Whisky cannot be made quickly. Aged stock, once sold, cannot be replaced in less time than it takes to mature. When global demand for Japanese whisky grew faster than anyone had planned for - driven partly by awards, partly by cocktail culture’s embrace of Japanese serves like the Highball and the Mizuwari, partly by the luxury goods logic that equates scarcity with desirability - distilleries found themselves drawing down reserves of aged stock they could not replenish in time to meet demand.

The result was a wave of No Age Statement releases: whiskies sold without an age declaration, blended to a flavour profile rather than anchored to a specific maturation period. Some of these expressions are genuinely excellent. Some are not. And crucially, as we discussed in our article on single malt terminology, the absence of formal Japanese whisky regulations before 2021 meant that bottles labelled “Japanese whisky” could - and sometimes did - contain significant proportions of imported Scotch or Canadian spirit, given a Japanese label and sold at a premium price. ¹²

The 2021 voluntary standards introduced by the Japan Spirits and Liqueurs Makers Association addressed this, requiring that all Japanese whisky - to use that label - be made from malted grains, fermented and distilled in Japan, matured in Japan for at least three years, and bottled in Japan at minimum 40% ABV. Nikka made the implications explicit: Nikka from the Barrel, one of the most beloved expressions in the category, was quietly removed from the “Japanese whisky” classification because it contains spirit from Nikka’s Scottish distillery, Ben Nevis. ¹³ It remains the same excellent whisky. But it can no longer make the same claim.

This kind of honest reckoning is, I think, to the industry’s long-term credit - and it connects to the transparency themes we have explored throughout the Wood Series.

The New Generation

What Japan is doing now is the part of the story that is most interesting, and most underreported.

A generation of smaller distilleries - Chichibu, Akkeshi, Nagahama, Shizuoka - is producing whisky with a contemporary ambition that is neither purely Scottish in its homage nor simply a continuation of the Suntory-Nikka tradition. Chichibu, founded in 2007 by Ichiro Akuto in Saitama Prefecture, has become one of the most celebrated micro-distilleries in the world, producing whisky from locally grown barley, experimenting with Japanese cask types including mizunara, and releasing expressions in such limited quantities that they are routinely compared in rarity and critical esteem to the finest independent bottlings from Scotland.

Akkeshi Distillery on the eastern tip of Hokkaido has taken peat seriously in a way that even Yoichi did not - sourcing peat from local Hokkaido bogs rather than from Scotland, and producing whisky with a genuinely Japanese terroir that sits at the intersection of Islay and the North Pacific. It is not Scotch. It is not an imitation of Scotch. It is something that could only have been made in that place, by people who understood what they were doing at the deepest level.

This is the final turn of the story - the one that the watch parallel illuminates most clearly. Japan began by studying Switzerland. It then equalled Switzerland. It then surpassed Switzerland on Switzerland’s own terms. And then it invented the Spring Drive. The independent Japanese watchmakers producing a few dozen watches a year in Tokyo workshops are doing something that owes a debt to the Swiss tradition but is no longer in conversation with it - it has its own aesthetic logic, its own materials, its own ideas about what a watch is for.

The new generation of Japanese whisky distilleries is beginning to occupy the same position. The debt to Scotland is real and acknowledged. But what is being made in Akkeshi and Chichibu today is not Scottish whisky made in Japan. It is Japanese whisky - distinct, original, and still in the early stages of discovering what it can be.

A Note on a Future Series

I mentioned watches at the opening of this article, and I want to return to it briefly.

The demographics of serious watch collecting and serious whisky collecting overlap significantly: both tend to attract people who are interested in craft, provenance, history, and the specific relationship between time, patience, and quality. Both involve objects that accumulate meaning as well as value. Both reward the collector who understands what they are looking at over the collector who simply follows secondary market prices.

At Devon Drams, we are planning a future series of events and articles that explore these connections - between Japan’s contribution to whisky and its contribution to watchmaking, between the aesthetics of a beautifully finished dial and a well-matured dram, between the patience required to build a watch collection worth having and the patience required to build a whisky shelf worth sharing.

If that prospect interests you, let us know. Come and find us at a tasting, or get in touch directly - we would love to hear from you.

devondrams.com/events | community@devondrams.com

Devon Drams articles referenced in this piece

-What Does “Single Malt” Actually Mean? - on Japanese whisky regulations, the 2021 voluntary standards, and the Nikka from the Barrel classification question

-The Wood Series, Part Two: Beyond Oak - on mizunara oak, its wartime origin, and why it became Japanese whisky’s most distinctive contribution to the global category

-The Wood Series, Part One: The Jerez Secret - on transparency, authenticity, and why what is on the label matters

-The Collector and the Drinker: A Case for Both - on scarcity, limited editions, and the relationship between collecting and meaning

Sources

1. Cypher Watch Company. Why Japan Quietly Dominates Watchmaking. Available at: https://cypherwatches.com/blogs/journal/why-japan-quietly-dominates-watchmaking-5-revolutions-switzerland-never-saw-coming (Accessed: June 2026)

2. Ibid.

3. Wikipedia. Masataka Taketsuru. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masataka_Taketsuru (Accessed: June 2026)

4. Nikka Whisky. The Founder. Available at: https://www.nikka.com/en/story/founder/ (Accessed: June 2026)

5. Great Drams. The Remarkable Tale of Rita Cowan (Taketsuru). Available at: https://greatdrams.com/the-remarkable-tale-of-rita-cowan-taketsuru-the-mother-of-japanese-whisky/ (Accessed: June 2026)

6. Whisky Flight. The Father of Japanese Whisky. Available at: https://whisky-flight.com/entries/205-the-father-of-japanese-whisky (Accessed: June 2026)

7. University of Glasgow. Japanese Whisky’s Roots. Available at: https://www.gla.ac.uk/explore/avenue/ourpast/japanesewhiskeysroots/ (Accessed: June 2026)

8. Devon Drams. The Wood Series, Part Two: Beyond Oak. devondrams.com/news (Accessed: June 2026)

9. Nikka Whisky Europe. Nikka Story. Available at: https://www.nikkawhisky.eu/nikka-story/ (Accessed: June 2026)

10. Seiko Watch Corporation. The Seiko Brand 100 Stories: History. Available at: https://www.seikowatches.com/us-en/special/100stories/history/ (Accessed: June 2026)

11. MaesLux. The History of Japanese Automatic Movements in Fine Watchmaking. Available at: https://www.maeslux.com/en-us/blogs/journal/history-japanese-automatic-movements-fine-watchmaking (Accessed: June 2026)

12. Devon Drams. What Does “Single Malt” Actually Mean? devondrams.com/news (Accessed: June 2026)

13. Ibid.