Shirakawa: The Japanese Distillery You’ve Never Heard Of

This week, 24 August 2022, Takara Shuzo Co. Ltd unveiled the world’s rarest Japanese whisky ever released: Shirakawa 1958.

This wasn't Yamazaki breaking their own record with a 56-year-old whisky, or a ludicrously limited Karuizawa, but a distillery that many whisky enthusiasts, and experts, will never have even heard of before; hence its billing as the world’s rarest.

The Japanese whisky boom characterised the beginning of the new millennium for the global whisky industry. It was fuelled by an explosion of interest and awareness in the quality of product through a number of international whisky accolades and even a feature within Hollywood film. Ever since, the growth of the industry has been rising and unquenchable demand has pushed interest and values of Japanese whisky on the secondary market to stratospheric levels.

It may be hard to imagine now, however, in its short 100-year history the commercial Japanese whisky industry has experienced turbulent times just like its Scotch counterpart. The beginnings of the industry were hard for many distilleries, and the Shirakawa distillery was one of the industry's casualties.

As with all whisky producing nations, the history of Japan’s is one of peaks and troughs. While we associate the loss of names like Karuizawa and Hanyu to a period of decline, the fate of Shirakawa appears to have been the opposite.

Closing at a time when the popularity of whisky was on the rise, its shuttering coincided with that of the Yamanashi grain distillery as their owners consolidated production at larger facilities, victims of their own success.

While it appeared history had doomed us to never sampling the unblended production of either, the appearance of a debut Shirakawa single malt after over half a century is a truly special moment that cannot be understated and will likely never be repeated.

Joe Wilson, Whisky Auctioneer

Shirakawa was opened in Fukushima Prefecture, approx. 200km north of Tokyo, in 1939 by Daikoku Budoshu, a large wine and spirits producer. The distillery was then acquired following the Second World War by Takara Shuzo in 1947. The Shirakawa distillery operated for over six decades, however, only produced malt whisky between 1951 – 1968. In its latter years, its buildings were used solely as a bottling plant before being eventually demolished in 2003.

The land where Shirakawa once sat was gifted by Takara Shuzo in 2011 to build emergency housing to accommodate the locals who had been displaced by the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami.

The whisky produced at Shirakawa was rumoured to be of exceptional quality, however, like many distilleries of the time it was destined only for blended whisky, the population's preference at the time. Under Takara’s ownership, Shirakawa produced both whisky and beer, and the “King Blended Whisky” became a prominent brand in the 1950s and 60s. The distillery released the first whisky to bear the Shirakawa name at some point in the mid-1980s, a 'King Whisky Shirakawa Pure Malt' 12 Year Old bottled at 43%.

Shirakawa’s whisky has rarely been seen, even on the secondary market. At Whisky Auctioneer, we’ve never auctioned any of Shirakawa’s output, and there’s very little that is publicly known about the distillery’s production and output.

There are no known examples of Japanese whisky claiming to be from a single vintage that predate Shirakawa 1958.

 Even though Shirakawa distillery was one of the pioneers of malt whisky making in Japan, the liquid was never officially available as a single malt.

Stefan van Eycken, a leading authority on Japanese whisky

The whisky came to light after Stephen Bremner, MD of Scotland-based Tomatin Distillery Co – which has been owned by Japanese producer, Takara Shuzo Co. Ltd, since 1986 - became intrigued by the Japanese company’s early history of malt whisky production. During exploratory research, he pieced together anecdotal information from previous employees about whisky production and searched for long lost documents that might shed some light on Shirakawa’s single malt Japanese whisky making past.

The final remaining parcel was identified in Takara Shuzo’s Kurokabegura in 2019. The liquid had been distilled in 1958, aged in cask, then transferred to ceramic jars at the distillery. When Shirakawa closed, it was put into stainless steel tanks at Takara Shuzo’s factory in Kyushu where it lay untouched until now.

Source: Takara Shuzo/Tomatin Distillery

Once released, this will be the only official single malt bottling from Shirakawa Distillery and the earliest single vintage Japanese whisky ever bottled. The precise age of the whisky cannot be specified and although production details are unclear, it is from a time when the distillery used predominantly Japanese malted barley and Mizunara oak casks.

The release comes at an interesting time as interest in lost Japanese distilleries renews. Some of the latest auction sales on whiskyauctioneer.com demonstrated the highest prices ever realised for whiskies from lost distilleries such as Kawasaki – a sister distillery to Karuizawa - and a recent old example of Karuizawa's single malt bottled under the Ocean Whisky brand reached a record price of £6,200.

The perceived lack of demand for Japanese whisky at the turn of the 20th century has proven to be the defining moment in the nation’s distilling history in the years that have followed.

While scaled-down production at big companies like Nikka and Suntory recently resulted in portfolio-crippling stock shortages, it conversely had the positive effect of bringing its recently closed distilleries to prominence.

The revery those single malts quickly acquired has progressed emphatically to near-insatiable demand and, in a period when diminishing stocks means we may soon be seeing the last of these names, for a new one in Shirakawa to reappear from the distant annals of history is as incredible as it was unthinkable.

Joe Wilson, Whisky Auctioneer