The Founding Story Behind Japan’s Oldest Whisky Maker

More than a century before Japanese whisky became one of the most coveted spirits in the world, a young merchant in Osaka had a simple observation: the wines and liquors being imported from Europe didn’t suit Japanese tastes. What he built from that insight—one product at a time, for the last 127 years and counting—is now one of the largest beverage companies on earth.

Below, a brief history of the House of Suntory.

The house that Torii built

In 1899, Shinjiro Torii opened a small shop in Osaka selling imported wines and spirits. He had noticed something that would shape the next century of Japanese drinking culture: Western alcohol, however popular or prestigious, did not suit Japanese tastes. The flavors were too strong and too dry. Rather than simply continuing to stock shelves with imports, Torii set about reinventing them for his customers.

Torii’s first significant product, Akadama Port Wine—”akadama” being a Japanese term loosely translating to “red ball earth” in English—was released in 1907. Suntory has a long history of bold advertising, which started with the release of Akadama Port Wine.

The most famous ad for the sweet drink was a 1922 image featuring actress Emiko Matsushima in what was the first nude poster printed in Japan. The sepia-toned photo depicted Matsushima topless while holding a bright red glass of wine. The public reaction was immediate and divided given Japan was still very conservative at the time. But the ad won first place at a global poster contest in Germany despite the controversy. Akadama is still produced today, though it has been sold as Akadama Sweet Wine since 1973, when Portugal successfully pushed to restrict the use of the word “port” to fortified wines produced in Portugal.

In the early 20th century, Scotch whisky started to carry an enormous cachet in post-isolationist Japan. The Meiji Era, which lasted from 1868 to 1912, was a period of rapid modernization in Japan following the restoration of imperial rule under Emperor Meiji, during which the country transformed from a feudal society into a modern industrial nation.

But even amidst this economic climate inspired by Westernization, Torii was not interested in producing a simple replica. Torii formally found his company as “Kotobukiya Limited” in 1921. (Not to be confused with an action figure manufacturer of the same name founded in 1953.) In 1923, he founded the Yamazaki Distillery on the outskirts of Kyoto as Japan’s first and oldest whisky distillery. It’s now widely regarded today as the birthplace of Japanese whisky.

The choice of Yamazaki was not accidental. The area sits at the confluence of three rivers—the Katsura, the Uji, and the Kizu—producing a humid, misty climate that proved well-suited to spirit maturation. The water drawn from the site had long been prized in traditional Japanese tea culture. Additionally, Kyoto was close enough to serve as both a cultural influence and a practical market.

Torii’s first whisky, Shirofuda, meaning “White Label,” launched in 1929 as Japan’s first commercial whisky but failed to find an audience, a setback that taught Torii that success in the Japanese market required a lighter, more delicate flavor profile than Western spirits typically offered. The company pressed on with other spirits; in 1936, Suntory introduced its first Japanese gin, Hermes. (It would be followed by Hermes Vodka in 1956.) Torii’s breakthrough came in 1937 with the introduction of Suntory Whisky Kakubin, named for its distinctive square bottle, which became the cornerstone of Japanese whisky and remains one of Japan’s top-selling whiskies by value to this day.

How Suntory got its name

World War II forced a halt to any new product development. In 1946, the company reignited with the release of Torys Whisky, a blended and affordable, everyday spirit with an anglicized-spelling and pronunciation of its founder’s name. The post-war era also saw the company kick its advertising unit into high gear.

As Japan’s economy started to rebound in following decade, Suntory moved to position whisky as the drink of the emerging salaryman class. By the mid-1950s, the company had opened more than 1,500 bars serving Torys (known as “Torys Bars”) across the country, designed for after work drinks. In 1958, Suntory went further, debuting a mascot to go with them: Uncle Torys, an animated man in a tie or bowtie, always smiling, who appeared in television commercials, newspaper ads, subway advertisements, and even on bar accessories like coasters and toothpick holders.

Created by animator Ryohei Yanagihara, the character captured the mood of a country rebuilding itself at the time, depicting a glum office worker who enters a bar, downs a few drams, and leaves with a skip in his step. While he appears vintage now, Uncle Torys actually never quite retired and can still be occasionally spotted today. The character appeared prominently in ads through the 1960s and 1970s, but now he mostly sticks to Torys-brand highball cans.

In 1961, the company launched a special advertising campaign, “Drink Torys and Go to Hawaii,” raffling a trip to the tropical state at a time when international travel was still considered a once-in-a-lifetime prospect for most Japanese consumers. Akin to Uncle Torys, it captured the optimism of a nation emerging from what had been known as “takenoko seikatsu,” or bamboo-shoot existence, a term for the immediate post-war years in which many Japanese families bartered clothing for food, shedding layers as they went, like the outer sheaths of a growing bamboo shoot.

One of the biggest milestones came in 1963, when the business rebranded as “Suntory,” taken from the name of its whisky, itself derived from the English word “sun”—a nod to Akadama—combined with “Tory,” referencing both the founder and the 1946 release.

During Japan’s period of rapid economic growth in the 1970s, Suntory sales skyrocketed. In 1970, annual sales of Suntory Old Whisky, another spirit in the portfolio first released in 1950, stood at roughly 1 million cases, according to Japanese news agency Nippon.com. By 1974, that figure had reached 5 million. By 1978, it had doubled to 10 million, and by 1980, it had climbed to 12.4 million, making Suntory Old one of the bestselling whiskies in the world within a single decade.

A new blend

In 1989, more than six decades after Yamazaki first began producing whisky, Suntory introduced one of its most important innovations since the release of Torys: Hibiki. Translating to “echo” or “resonance” in Japanese, Hibiki is a blended whisky drawing from malt and grain whiskies aged in different cask types across its distilleries.

The foundations for Hibiki had been laid decades earlier. When Torii founded Yamazaki in 1923, he brought in Masataka Taketsuru, who had studied whisky-making in Scotland, as the distillery’s first master distiller. Taketsuru departed in 1934 to establish his own distillery, which would eventually become Nikka, now owned by the Asahi Group. But the techniques and standards Taketsuru helped establish at Yamazaki shaped Suntory’s production philosophy for generations. By the time Hibiki launched, the company had accumulated more than 60 years of blending experience to draw from.

“This is a whisky born in 1989 from a very specific ambition: to share the pinnacle, the masterpiece, of Japanese culture with the world. That intention hasn’t changed,” Masaki Morimoto, president of The House of Suntory, tells T&C. “We have always seen blending not simply as a technique, but as an artistic approach.”

Recognition came quickly. The Hibiki 17-Year-Old won gold medals at international competitions within a year of its release, and a 30-Year-Old expression followed in 2003. The brand has since become one of the most recognized Japanese whiskies in the world, especially thanks to a prominent appearance in Sofia Coppola’s 2003 film Lost in Translation, in which Bill Murray’s character films a series of advertisements for for Hibiki.

Global expansion

The company’s ambitions extended well beyond Japan (and whisky) over the following decades. After already expanding its portfolio to soft drinks in the 1960s and 1970s, Suntory launched BOSS Coffee in 1992, canned and plastic-bottled coffee beverages sold at convenience stores and vending machines across the country. Now one of the company’s most iconic and popular items, it was a necessary diversification amid the “Lost Decade” and Japan’s economic downturn in the 1990s.

It was around this time that Suntory used its flagship product to revive domestic demand for blended whisky. Suntory launched a series of celebrity-driven advertising campaigns, recruiting famous actors such as Sean Connery and Keanu Reeves to film commercials.

The 2000s marked the beginning of Suntory’s transformation into a global beverages empire. In 2010, Suntory acquired Orangina-Schweppes for $3.3 billion and Frucor energy drinks for $762 million. In 2013, it purchased the drinks division of GlaxoSmithKline for $2.1 billion. Suntory’s beverage and food division went public on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 2013. The IPO raised nearly $4 billion. The largest move came in January 2014, when Suntory announced a $16 billion agreement to acquire Beam Inc., the largest U.S. bourbon producer and the company behind Jim Beam, making Suntory the world’s third largest spirits maker. The acquisition was completed in April 2014, and the subsidiary was renamed Beam Suntory, later rebranded as Suntory Global Spirits in 2024.

While not as bad as the 1990s, Japanese whisky sales were still in a bit of a slump in the early part of the 21st century—until the 2010s. Suntory returned to an old instinct—getting its product into bars—this time by promoting the whisky highball in izakayas, the casual Japanese pubs that anchor the country’s after-work social culture. The campaigns positioned the highball not as a cocktail but as a food-friendly drink, targeting the dining habits of Japanese office workers. “We are trying to create a buzz around whisky,” Keita Minari, a Suntory brand manager, told The Guardian in 2013. “A popular TV program in Japan picked up on Marugin [a bar in Tokyo] and the new trend for drinking highballs, and it said people there were drinking whisky more than beer. When you are having a meal, whisky doesn't stay in your stomach, unlike beer where you get full very easily.”

Suntory also pushed to standardize how the drink was made, introducing specialized keg machines designed to produce a consistently cold, highly carbonated pour at a precise 1:4 whisky-to-soda ratio. The effort worked like a charm, and reversed years of declining whisky sales in Japan and repositioned the category from a luxury or old-fashioned drink into something accessible. Simultaneously, Japanese whisky exports exploded; in the United States alone, they reportedly grew tenfold from 2013 through the start of the pandemic.

Torii’s legacy

As Japanese whisky grew in global popularity, questions arose about what the designation “Japanese whisky” actually meant. In 2021, the Japan Spirits and Liqueurs Makers Association established formal standards for labeling a product as Japanese whisky, requiring that water, saccharification, fermentation, distillation, aging, and bottling all take place in Japan, with a minimum maturation period of three years in wooden casks.

The standardization comes after a shortage of Japanese whisky brought on by the international demand of the 2010s. Paradoxically, it also came at a time when Japanese whisky sales tapering off again. After 15 years of unprecedented growth, Japanese whisky exports slowed for the first time in 2023, with export volumes falling 9% from the previous year.

A new industry logo was introduced in 2025 to help consumers identify compliant products. The emblem depicts the letters “JW” at its center, surrounded by the words “Japanese Whisky” and “JSLMA”—representing the Japan Spirits and Liqueurs Makers Association—all inscribed on the head of a whisky cask.

Suntory confirmed that all of its Japanese whisky products meet the standards, with new logos displayed on its packaging this year. In response to the implementation of the new production standards, company leaders say the ethos Torii established more than 125 years ago has carried through every generation of leadership since, so maintaining quality has never been an issue. One of these values, “Yatte Minahare,” roughly translated as “go for it,” reflects the founder’s willingness to attempt what had not been done before. Another is a commitment to “Wa.” Also the oldest attested name of Japan dating back to the 2nd century AD, Wa is considered a harmony between craft and environment, rooted in Japanese aesthetics rather than imported convention.

In March 2025, Nobuhiro Torii, the great-grandson of the founder, was appointed president of Suntory Holdings, returning the company’s corporate leadership to its founding family. That same year, Yamazaki Single Malt became the first brand to win Supreme Champion Spirit at the International Spirits Challenge for three consecutive years.

“The rise of Japanese whisky globally has been extraordinary to witness, and with that comes both opportunity and responsibility,” Morimoto says. “Integrity, for us, is inseparable from the craft itself. We work on nature’s timeline, not our own. Great whisky takes time and cannot be rushed, and the master blender’s role is to honor that, ensuring that every expression delivers the depth, balance, and refinement the brand was built on.”