WHAT IF?
It’s human nature to be fascinated by ‘what-if’ scenarios, and this one applies to whisky: there was a point in the mid-1890s when, if things had panned out differently, whisky making in Japan, America, and potentially elsewhere in the world, too, would have developed along entirely different lines.
Jokichi Takamine was born on 3 November 1854 in the Takaoka district of the Kaga Domain (present-day Toyama prefecture). Born to a samurai physician father and a mother from a sake-making family, he was the oldest of 13 children. At the age of 10, he was sent to Nagasaki by the lord of the Kaga Domain to study English and Western science. After continuing his education in Osaka and Tokyo, Takamine moved to the UK, where he studied industrial engineering at the University of Glasgow (and elsewhere) between 1880 and 1883. To put this into perspective, this was 35 years before Masataka Taketsuru, the 'father' of Japanese whisky, arrived in Glasgow.
Takamine’s journey after his studies in the UK is a fascinating one, but, fast-forwarding to 1890, he moved to Chicago and established the Takamine Ferment Company to develop a digestive aid using koji amylase. Takamine patented the process of using koji, a type of mould used in
