Nikka time

When Bill Murray’s character went to Japan in Lost in Translation, he did so to promote whisky. Of course, in the process he met Scarlett Johansson’s character, and discovered that there is more to life. This is about Masataka Taketsuru, the man who made the whisky that Bill Murray was sent to sell.

Taketsuru virtually created the Japanese whisky industry, which today is the second-largest producer of Scotch single malts in the world. And his story begins almost eighty years ago, when he left Japan and went halfway round the world to Scotland.

His family was in the sake business, but the legend goes that after he drank his first Scotch he became fascinated by the land that produced such an elixir. So he steamed along for a few months, for several thousand miles, past the vestiges of the British Empire to the British Isles in the early 1920s. Today, a flight from Tokyo’s Narita Airport will deposit you at Heathrow in 10 hours. Back then you were lucky if your steamer made it from Nagasaki to Southampton in 10 weeks.

Taketsuru did his apprenticeship in Scotland. He even married a Scot, Rita Cowan, and he honed his craft at the now-defunct Hazelburn distillery, one of the original producers of the renowned Campbeltown Single Malts. Today, the independent Springbank distillery produces a Hazelburn Single Malt.

Taketsuru returned to Japan in the 1930s to work at Kotobukiya, a sake producer, where he helped set up a whisky distillery. Today, the Kotobukiya distillery is part of the Suntory Group, the largest whisky producer in Japan. But Taketsuru wanted more and moved to the northern-most of Japan’s main islands, Hokkaido, which, like Scotland, has a cold climate and mountainous region with hundreds of fresh springs. He believed it would have the perfect conditions for making Japanese Scotch.

And he succeeded—though not at Kotobukiya, for soon after setting up the distillery he left to set up shop himself. He set up Dai Nippon Kaju K.K. in Yoichi in 1934 and the first bottle from the by then renamed Nikka Distillery was sold in 1940, a year before Japan got embroiled in war against the very country where Taketsuru had learnt his trade.

Despite this setback, by the time Taketsuru died in 1979, he had managed to convert the Japanese into a nation of whisky drinkers. Even though today Nikka is owned by that other Japanese alcoholic icon, Asahi Breweries, those who know it love it. But here’s the strange thing—the Japanese love their booze so much, they tend to keep it to themselves.

Even at top Japanese restaurants across the world, it isn’t easy finding their whisky. And when you drink it you realise why. It’s excellent. It doesn’t have the peaty nature of Campbeltown malts, but it does have a very smooth texture, and depending on which one you pick up, and there are a lot of different whiskies that Nikka make—blends and single malts—you realise that this stuff is pretty good. And strong. But if you were to do a blind tasting, you would think that everything from Nikka came from half a world away.

Try Nikka’s range at Wasabi by Morimoto at the Taj Mansingh, New Delhi. Call (011) 23026162.