The Man Who Carried Scotland Home

The lights went down at Metro Private Cinema in Chelsea, and for a moment the room did what a good cinema does. It stopped being a room in New York and became somewhere else.

We had been invited to the launch of Taketsuru Pure Malt Essentials 2026, hosted by Nikka Whisky through MMGY Wagstaff, on a Thursday evening in October. The format was simple and unusual: storytelling, film, and then a tasting, led by Naohiko Kumagai. Before anyone was allowed a glass, we were asked to sit and learn who the whisky was named after.

What follows is the story we took home. It is a love story, a study in stubbornness, and a reminder that some of the greatest things in any industry begin with one person on a ship, carrying a notebook.

A sake brewer's son

Masataka Taketsuru was born in 1894 in Takehara, in Hiroshima Prefecture, into a family that had brewed sake for generations. He grew up around fermentation, patience, and the quiet arithmetic of aging a product you may not live to see sold.

He studied brewing, and then he did something that did not come naturally to a young man in his position. He looked beyond the tradition he was born into. Japan at the time had a taste for Western spirits, and almost no one at home knew how to make a proper whisky. He took a job in Osaka with a liquor company, Settsu Shuzo, which had ambitions to change that.

The company needed someone to learn the craft where it was practiced. In 1918, they sent Taketsuru to Scotland.

Glasgow, and the notebooks

He arrived and enrolled at the University of Glasgow, attending chemistry classes. The lectures, by his own later account, taught him less about whisky than he hoped. So he did the thing that mattered more: he left the classroom and went to the stills.

He apprenticed at Longmorn, in Speyside. He worked at the Bo'ness distillery in the Lowlands, where he learned about grain whisky. He went to Campbeltown and worked at Hazelburn, where he absorbed not only how malt whisky is made but the art of blending.

He wrote everything down. Temperatures, timings, how a still was shaped, how a cask was chosen. The notebooks he filled became known as the Taketsuru Notes, and they are the closest thing Japanese whisky has to a founding document. A young man from a sake family learned from the original makers, then carried their craft home on paper.

Rita

Somewhere in those years, whisky stopped being the only thing he was thinking about.

In Glasgow, Taketsuru was invited to a family's home to teach judo to a young relative. The family was the Cowans, and the eldest daughter, Jessie Roberta, whom everyone called Rita, was there. Accounts differ on the exact details of how the introduction happened, but the result did not. They fell in love.

It was not an easy match for anyone. A Scottish woman and a Japanese man in 1919 and 1920 was, to put it gently, not what either family had planned. Both sides objected. They married anyway, in Glasgow, in January 1920.

Then Rita made the decision that changes this from a good story into a remarkable one. In 1922, they returned to Japan together, and Rita stayed by his side for the rest of her life. She left Scotland, her family, and everything familiar, for a country she had never seen, where she would be one of very few foreign women, and where the war years later would make her life far harder than anyone could have guessed.

When we say Nikka begins with Taketsuru, that is true. But it does not begin without Rita.

The long road to Hokkaido

Going home did not deliver the dream at once. Settsu Shuzo, facing money trouble, abandoned its whisky project. Taketsuru left the company in 1922, and for a time the couple lived on little. Rita taught English to help pay the bills.

Then came an offer from Shinjiro Torii of Kotobukiya, the company that would become Suntory, who wanted an expert to build a whisky distillery. Taketsuru oversaw the construction of Yamazaki, Japan's first commercial malt whisky distillery, and stayed for a decade.

But he had always known where he wanted to make his own whisky, and it was not near Kyoto. He wanted a place whose cold, wet climate felt like Scotland's, clean and a little wild. In 1934, he found it on the northern island of Hokkaido, in a town called Yoichi. Many of his advisors thought the idea was reckless. He built the distillery anyway, and he built it the way he had learned in Scotland, with pot stills fired directly by coal.

Apples, pianos, and patience

A new distillery has a problem that no passion can solve: whisky takes years to age, and in the meantime the bills still arrive.

So the company sold apple juice. Apples from Hokkaido, pressed and bottled, kept the lights on while the first spirit slept in oak. The name itself carries the story. Nikka is short for Nippon Kaju, a nod to that early juice business. Rita, meanwhile, gave English and piano lessons from their home.

Imagine it. A founder with a distillery full of whisky that is not yet ready, a wife teaching piano to keep the household afloat, and a town of snow outside. The first Nikka whisky reached the market in 1940.

The war years that followed were hard on everyone, and harder on Rita, who was treated with suspicion because of where she came from. She stayed. She never returned to Scotland.

Two distilleries, two temperaments

In 1969, Taketsuru opened a second distillery in Miyagikyo, in Sendai. If Yoichi is the bold, coastal, coal-fired heart of Nikka, Miyagikyo is the softer, fruitier side of the house, gentler by design. Together they give the house its range, and it is the conversation between the two that makes Nikka blends worth studying.

Rita passed away in 1961, long before the house reached its full reputation. Masataka lived on until 1979, dying at the age of 85. The two of them rest together in Yoichi, and their grave looks out over the distillery they built.

Today, Rita's hometown of Kirkintilloch in Scotland is a sister city of Yoichi, Japan. It is a small, lovely detail: a bond between two towns that traces back to one marriage.

The room

Which brings us back to the cinema in Chelsea.

Taketsuru Pure Malt Essentials 2026 is the first of five limited editions leading to the thirtieth anniversary of Taketsuru Pure Malt in 2030. Five releases, five years of patience, a countdown that suits a founder who thought in decades. Sitting in that dark room, hearing the story told in film before a drop was poured, you could feel why Nikka chose to launch it this way. The whisky is the last chapter, not the first.

The tasting, led by Naohiko Kumagai, was the moment the story became something you could hold.

In front of each of us sat a printed mat and a row of Glencairn glasses, each one set on a circle marking its place. It was a flight meant to be read like a chapter list.

The pours included the regular Taketsuru Pure Malt, the everyday bottle that carries the founder's name. The Yoichi Single Malt Vintage 2000. The Miyagikyo Single Malt Vintage 2000. And the star of the evening, Taketsuru Pure Malt Essentials 2026, the release the night was built around.

Laid out side by side, the logic of the whole house became visible. Yoichi and Miyagikyo are the two parents, and Taketsuru Pure Malt is what happens when a blender brings them together. Tasting them in a row, the distinction between the two distilleries was clear in the glass, in the richness and in the floral tones.

One thing we will pass on, because it surprised the room: this whisky comes in at 69 percent alcohol. That is cask strength by any measure, and the advice that came with it was refreshingly honest. If it feels too hot, add a little water. There is no shame in it. Water opens a whisky like this up, and part of the fun is discovering where it blooms for you.

We left with a gift and a lot to think about. Mostly, we left thinking about a man who learned a craft by sitting in someone else's distillery, and a woman who made his life's work possible by choosing a country she had never seen.

With thanks

Our thanks to the Nikka Whisky team and to MMGY Wagstaff for the invitation, and to Mikaela Frigillana for thinking of us and inviting us in. Thanks also to Naohiko Kumagai for leading the tasting, and to everyone in that room who made a Thursday evening feel like an event. To Orlando and Amanda, who were there with us, thank you for making the night what it was.

Follow along with the people who made it happen: @nikkawhiskyusa, @wagstaffmktg, @nkuma_uk, @jena.lane, @joanna.lin, @patymo22, @bzrong, @amhath68, @barmoga, @rudeboyshinshin.

Your turn

Which spirits story should we cover next, and if you could pour one bottle for Masataka and Rita, which Nikka would it be? Tell us in the comments, and follow @theinnovatorsden.

Invited guest of Nikka Whisky and MMGY Wagstaff. Transportation and a gift were provided. 21+, please drink responsibly.