Masataka Taketsuru: The Hiroshima Man Who Built Yamazaki, and Then Nikka
2025.11.20
Yamazaki, recognised worldwide ── three years running at the summit
2023: Yamazaki 25.
2024: Yamazaki 12.
And 2025: Yamazaki 18.
Do you know what Yamazaki has done at the International Spirits Challenge?
Supreme Champion Spirit is given to a single bottle across every category. Yamazaki has taken it three years running.
One brand at the top of the world, three years in a row.
No one had done that in the history of the ISC.
Not Scotland, not Ireland. Japan’s Yamazaki has made that title its own.
But did you know there is Hiroshima blood at the source of it?
The father of Japanese whisky was a man from Takehara, Hiroshima
Masataka Taketsuru.
No whisky drinker in Japan doesn’t know the name. Outside Japan he is remembered as the founder of Nikka — but that came later.
He was born in 1894, third son of the Taketsuru sake brewery in Takehara, Hiroshima.
A boy whose playground was a brewery, who grew up watching the backs of craftsmen making sake.
He went to work for a Western spirits company, and then travelled alone to Scotland, carrying one determination: to make real whisky in Japan.
He trained there, and returned in 1923 carrying the Taketsuru Notes — everything he had learned about making whisky, written down.
Shinjiro Torii, the founder of Suntory, brought him in as the first manager of Yamazaki Distillery.
Building the distillery. Designing the pot stills. Directing the production.
All of it carried by one man from Takehara, Hiroshima.
Yamazaki Distillery was completed in 1924. In 1929 came Suntory Shirofuda, Japan’s first genuine whisky.
The foundation of the Yamazaki the world knows now was laid, unmistakably, by a man from Hiroshima.
Yamazaki is where I started, too
Yamazaki is a particular place for me as well.
It was the first distillery I ever visited.
About nineteen years ago now.
I’d only ever seen a working distillery in books, and I wanted to see one with my own eyes. That plain curiosity is what sent me to Kyoto.
The copper shine of the pot stills.
The sweet, full smell rising off the washbacks.
And the cool air of a warehouse where thousands of casks were sleeping.
Everything my senses took in there was the door into whisky for me.
In the years since, I’ve been back to Yamazaki many times — with staff, with guests.
Every visit turns something up, and it deepens.
My whole life in whisky begins there, without question.
(These days you can’t even get a tour booking, so it’s become something of a phantom.)
Hiroshima’s craft made Japanese whisky
That the beginning of Yamazaki is bound up with Hiroshima, where he came from.
That this wasn’t coincidence — that it was, perhaps, always going to happen.
The Taketsuru brewery, his family’s, still makes sake in Takehara today.
Hiroshima has long been sake country — Takehara and Saijo above all.
A place where a fine-grained brewing craft, built on soft water, has been handed down without a break.
Fermentation, distillation, maturation — the respect and the philosophy Taketsuru absorbed through his skin as a child.
That spirit, raised in sake brewing, met what he learned in Scotland, and eventually flowered at Yamazaki.
Which means that behind the success of Japanese whisky, the DNA of Hiroshima brewing is alive and working.
Yamazaki at this bar, with Hiroshima behind it
Yamazaki, first in the world.
Bar Little Happiness holds a good range of it.
When you look at the amber in your glass, picture something for a moment.
Scotland, far away. And the landscape here in Hiroshima.
Drinking Yamazaki in Hiroshima 🥃
It may be more than tasting a fine whisky — it may be walking the road Masataka Taketsuru walked.
Every encounter is meant to be. Welcome to the world of Rum & Whisky.
Bar Little Happiness — Mika Tanimoto
