When Masataka Taketsuru set off from the port city of Kobe in 1918, fiercely determined to reach Scotland and master the craft of traditional whisky-making, he unwittingly set in motion a chain of events that would alter the course of Japan’s liquid fortunes for decades to come. Revered widely as one of the Japanese whisky trade’s two progenitors (the other being Suntory honcho Shinjirō Torii), he is credited with creating two of the country’s most desirable, well-recognised single malts: Yamazaki and Yoichi.

In spite of his own impressive ambitions – chief among them, the inception of authentic Scotch-style whisky distillation in Japan – Taketsuru couldn’t possibly have fathomed that the seed he, along with a handful of other pioneers, had planted would explode into a full-blown global phenomenon. In a 1968 biography commissioned by Nikkei, the legendary founder of Nikka Whisky freely admitted that he’d never dreamed “people would be drinking [so] much whisky”. “It seems just like yesterday that people were angry at me, when we first sold malt whisky in Japan,” he opined. “Many said there was no way anybody would drink something so smoky.”

These missives, humble as they were, reveal the frankly astounding evolution that Japan’s whisky business has undergone through the 20th and now 21st century: from 2009 to 2020, a Japanese whisky label won “Best Blended Whisky” at the WWA every single year; while Japan itself has emerged as the third largest whisky-producing nation by volume on earth. All of that begs the important – and relentlessly scrutinised – question about Japanese whisky’s ongoing collectability. Sometimes reduced to a handful of superlatives including “rare” and “over-hyped” by the drinking public, it’s perhaps more conducive to funnel our discussion of Japanese whisky along three thematic lines.

We’ll begin by recounting several of the most significant historical events behind Japanese whisky’s rise (at home and abroad); spotlight key regulatory and market-based forces at play in the current era; and, finally, offer our (wholly subjective) take on what trends might shape the industry in the near future.

Though the bulk of our discussion coincides with the timeframe when Japan’s whisky trade began to garner widespread acclaim abroad, it is useful to tackle the concomitant issue of supply – or rather, lack thereof. Foreign liquors (“yoshu”) in the vein of whisky have been present in Japan since the mid-19th century: the most famous example being 110 gallons of bourbon gifted by American commodore Matthew Perry to the Tokugawa shogunate (following its assignation to the Kanagawa Treaty). These more militaristic elements of whisky’s Japanese origin story would continue to resonate during the 1940s and 1950s, causing distilleries such as Nikka to grow tenfold during the initial part of World War II, before avoiding the worst effects of the post-war period, thanks to demand from Allied occupiers.

In order to wrestle back market share and rescue whisky from its decrepit image as a salaryman’s beverage, Suntory executives put together a nationwide campaign in 2007, extolling the pleasures of the ethereally refreshing whisky highball. It was, of course, a means to an end, allowing the company to promote inoffensive, high-volume drams like Toki and its iconic Kakubin blend to a new generation of consumers who detested the “fuddy-duddy” image of traditional Japanese malt drinkers.

By 2009, sales of blended Suntory malts had risen by 13 percent; and, more importantly, the highball’s popularity amongst cosmopolitan sophisticates meant that even overseas, drinkers (crucially, in North America) were beginning to warm to Japanese whisky’s charms. Then, in 2015, a divisive old critic by the name of Jim Murray crowned a no-age-statement (‘NAS’) bottle from the Suntory distillery Yamazaki his “whisky of the year” and, just like that, Japanese distillers found themselves caught in a riptide of international goodwill.

There had, of course, been a handful of awards going all the way back to the early 2000s, but Murray – whose annual Whisky Bible is treated, in certain circles, with gospel-like reverence – gave many drinkers in the West the final push they needed to unequivocally embrace malt and grain made in the East. According to Christopher Beccan, founder of watch and whisky enthusiasts’ platform Bexsonn:

Although it was Suntory who were credited with creating a malt of “near indescribable genius”, the new boom in global demand touched virtually every player in the Japanese whisky industry. Nikka (now owned by Suntory’s longtime rival Asahi) were in a similarly confounding position: having vastly underestimated how eager foreigners were to acquire bottles from its iconic Miyagikyo and Yoichi distilleries. But as all dram lovers well know, the solution wouldn't be found in a simple scaling of production – one of the pivotal lessons the company’s founder Taketsuru-san swore by his entire career:

As consumers and overseas suppliers continued to burn through Nikka’s strategic reserves, the company hewed to the wisdom of its founder, settling on a restructuring that would cover existing production quotas, while buying enough time to secure and mature those spirits in reserve. “You have to remember that, generally speaking, the whole caveat with a whisky business is you have to forecast 12 to 30 years in advance,” says Martin Eber, a Hong Kong-based spirits consultant and founder of TimeforWhisky.com. “Japanese distilleries hadn’t done that, because for much of their history the product visibly wasn’t that popular.”

In 2015, the entirety of Nikka’s age-statement single malt offering was discontinued, with the Yoichi and Miyagikyo labels revamped as NAS whiskies, made using a high proportion of “new-make” spirit. The market reacted almost immediately. In a fit of what Bunting wryly dubbed “terminal aunt syndrome” (“the relative you never visit until they’re terminally ill”), enterprising collectors began hoarding supplies of Yoichi 20, Miyagikyo 15, age-statement Suntory blends and whatever else they could lay their hands on. This in turn made many of the most popular Japanese whiskies functionally inaccessible to rank-and-file consumers, as supply pivoted towards private resellers and the rarefied arena of for-profit auction houses.

Last March, Sotheby’s auctioned off a single bottle of 52-year-old whisky from the defunct Karuizawa distillery – setting a new record for the brand at £352,860. Results like this are steadily becoming the norm, drawing more and more outsiders to the market, but for a result which ticks all the boxes – among sippers and speculators – it’s imperative to discuss the legendary Ichiro’s Card Series.

To dram lovers what a full set of vintage Patek Philippe perpetual calendars is to horologists, the Card Series neatly encapsulates many of the particularities of Japanese whisky collecting: it consists of stocks sourced from a closed distillery, marketing by a seminal industry figure, and includes dozens of drinking experiences at multiple stages of maturity. In the past half-decade, prices for the “complete” series have more than tripled at auction, with Bonhams achieving HK$11.9 million (approx. £1.1 million) in November 2020. To insiders like Eber, these results are as exciting as they are bewildering:

In order to explain how a set of niche whiskies bottled for Japan’s domestic market could become such a pillar of the auction world, the connection to one Hanyu distillery must first be elaborated. Originally established in 1941 by Isouji Akuto – the descendant of a storied family of 17th-century saké brewers – the facility was actively producing malt whisky for two decades before its untimely closure in 2000. Determined to preserve the Hanyu legacy, Ichiro Akuto (Isouji’s grandson) managed to rescue 400 casks before the distillery shuttered – the balance of which was then sold as the eponymous Ichiro’s Card Series.

For perceptive collectors, each card’s connection to Hanyu was already a strong draw, but Ichiro – himself a veteran of the Suntory marketing braintrust – sought to make his family’s discontinued whisky even more alluring, with technical quirks and a clever marketing hook. To that end, 54 labels inspired by French-suited playing cards were decided upon (i.e. all the cards in a standard deck, plus two unique Jokers). The whisky-finishing process was similarly eclectic, as Eber explains below:

The cards were gradually released between 2005 and 2014. All the while, Ichiro publicly insisted that he had never intended for the series to be treated as collectible. Rather, the sale of Hanyu’s existing stocks was a means of carrying on the Akuto family tradition – one that lives on in the guise of Venture Whisky, holding company of the “Ichiro’s Malt” brand from Chichibu. “So much of the success of the Cards Series is tied up with this legacy,” Eber observes. “That, and the fact that many of the bottles were hand-picked from a single cask.”

Other factors that underscore the popularity of Ichiro’s Cards will ring a bell for watch collectors: though there are technically only 54 varieties of Hanyu whisky, some of the individual cards were made in consecutive series. As previously mentioned, because these were bottled primarily for consumption, there is a lack of mechanisms by which collectors can reliably authenticate versions of a card released in the late 2000s versus, say, the 2010s. Broad risks associated with counterfeiting still haven’t deterred the most obsessive buyers from aggressive expenditure. “You see that in the popularity of random cards such as the ‘Six of Spades’,” says Eber. “People will spend up to four figures on these, solely for the purpose of ‘completing’ their collection.”

The counterfeiting of Card Series bottles is symptomatic of a wider problem hampering the Japanese whisky industry. As the spirit grows in international appeal, consumers have become inundated by what Beccan refers to as “faux” Japanese whisky – products cobbled together using Scotch, North American whiskey and sometimes even shōchū. Until recently, these world whiskies have been exported in bulk to Japan, where they are disguised as authentic Japanese products. “[It’s] then sold in bottles adorned with suitably faux-Japanese imagery on the labels for grossly inflated prices, to consumers who are none the wiser,” says drinks journalist Neil Ridley.

To combat this growing trend, the Japan Spirits & Liqueurs Makers Association (JSLMA) issued a set of new regulations that came into effect this April: intended as the first step to creating “a definitive framework” for the protection of Japanese-made whisky. Backed by all 83 members of the JSLMA, including Suntory and Asahi, the gesture symbolically acknowledges the industry’s long-simmering problems stemming from transparency. And though there are, for the moment, no accompanying legal enforcement mechanisms – compliance is on an opt-in basis – the framework equips consumers and distilleries with significantly better tools to steer Japanese whisky in a direction of accountability and authenticity.

In that sense, the JSLMA regulations are reminiscent of the legal framework that protects the Scottish whisky industry: at minimum, fermentation and distillation must take place entirely in Japan, while barrel-ageing must also occur locally for a duration of no less than three years. According to Beccan, these practices – promulgated by leading names in the industry – “will only improve the quality of Japanese whisky in the long run”. It will give smaller craft distilleries an opportunity to grow their footprint, as larger players are predicted to roll back supply, while focusing on bringing their whisky-making into compliance with the new standard. Already, sophisticated players like Nikka are jostling to position themselves ahead of the curve: its latest ‘From the Barrel’ marketing emphasises how the whisky’s recipe calls for “more than 100 different batches of malt and grain” and expressly mention that it does not meet all the JSLMA’s criteria for a bona fide “Japanese” whisky.

Even with the aid of our best crystal decanter, it is difficult to know precisely what the future of Japan’s whisky trade will hold. One of the surest aspects of further development relates to continuity: trends that have emerged over the past 8 to 10 years are likely to persist, whether that be a tightening of supply or the creation of new NAS expressions meant to bridge the gap between entry-level spirits (such as gin) and mature-age whisky. “Japanese distilleries are releasing more and more non-age-statement expressions that have been matured in obscure casks,” says Beccan. “This is so they can produce something that is a little bit different, while balancing the need to stay relevant and in-demand.”

Controlled reductions in supply at the top level, coupled with continually robust demand from overseas, has helped to engineer an environment poised for a new wave of independent distillers. Along Kagoshima’s west coast, a stone’s throw from the sand dunes of Fukiagehama, Kanosuke (a young-ish distillery owned by local shōchū maker Komasa Jyozo) is producing new make spirit which shows an abundance of promise. This June, the company released its inaugural single malt expression to positive reception: at first glance a seemingly young whisky, it benefits from a distillation process that makes use of three pot stills, all varying in shape and size; a geography that skews cool despite its proximity to the East China Sea; and, intriguingly, American oak casks formerly used to mellow shōchū.

“For a 3-year-old whisky, and a first release, it’s a very solid showing,” says Eber. “I can’t wait to see what other interesting expressions come out in future – especially given the variety of spirit [Kanosuke] plans to produce.”

The coming decade is also likely to be marked by moments of rejuvenation. As students of history well know, a number of culturally significant distilleries – many of which were at one time defunct – are making a comeback. In the case of Mars, the Japanese whisky label first established by the Hombo Shuzo conglomerate in 1949, the current boom in global demand has helped drive an unprecedented expansion in the company’s whisky-making activities.

Alongside Nikka and Suntory, Mars is currently among a handful of companies that simultaneously operate two distilleries. Mars Shinshu – the more famous of the two – has been producing drams intermittently since 1985 and boasts the title of “Japan’s highest distillery”, at a mountainous snow-capped elevation of 800m above sea level. That location was joined relatively recently by Mars Tsunuki: more than 1,000km south of Shinshu, in Kagoshima prefecture – Hombo Shuzo’s stronghold. Last April, the latter released its first single malt expression, a lightly peated whisky evoking the style of what warm-climate producers – in locales including Taiwan and Australia – are making abroad. Along with its own grain whisky, Tsunuki’s punchier style of malt is intended to balance the overall Mars portfolio. Given the company’s track record, there’s also the distinct possibility that these Tsunuki-made whiskies will find their way into other Mars blends.

Whatever the case, in the coming five to 10 years, it will be incumbent upon collectors of Japanese whisky to venture beyond the pale of the country’s biggest beverage producers. By any measure, it remains a much smaller business than that of Scotch or bourbon – and with that, a skewered ratio of demand versus supply promises to be a thorny issue. The upshot? The sun is still very much rising on Japan’s whisky trade.