A trading company, an Islay habit and a town known for oysters.

Akkeshi Distillery belongs to Kenten Jitsugyo, a small Tokyo trading company that imports raw ingredients for the food industry, according to a 2020 profile by the whisky writer Mamoru Tsuchiya, first published in Whisky Galore and republished in English by Nomunication. Its second-generation president, Keiichi Toita, founded the distillery. Tsuchiya writes that Toita first tasted Islay malt in the late 1990s, and that the company originally planned to export Japanese craft whisky to Britain; when the craft-whisky boom made such whisky hard to obtain, it decided around 2014 to make its own.

Japanese Wikipedia, drawing on Hokkaido business press, gives a longer run-up: planning from 2010, field surveys in eastern Hokkaido from around 2011, and test maturation from 2013 using spirit bought from two Japanese distilleries. Kenten Jitsugyo chose to hand each stage to specialists, Tsuchiya wrote, rather than learn every trade itself.

The site it chose is the town of Akkeshi, in the Kushiro region of eastern Hokkaido, close to the coast and to marshland protected under the Ramsar Convention. J-CAST News reported in July 2015 that Kenten Jitsugyo had signed an agreement with the town in November 2014 and was aiming to start operations in October 2016. Japanese Wikipedia dates the start of construction to 2015, and Tsuchiya’s profile says production began in October 2016. The company’s own site gives 2016 as the year distilling began and states the founding ambition plainly: to make a whisky “like an Islay malt” using traditional Scottish methods.

Akkeshi is better known for oysters, harvested in the brackish Lake Akkeshi nearby. One of Toita’s dreams, Tsuchiya wrote, was to eat Akkeshi oysters with Akkeshi’s own smoky whisky. The distillery draws its water from the Homakai River, Japanese Wikipedia says, and its brand site credits the town’s sea fog, clean air and abundant peat for the character it is after.

Scottish stills, Hokkaido barley.

The equipment is Scottish. Forsyths, the Scottish coppersmiths, handled the ordering of equipment, the layout of the distillery, trial distillations and staff training, Tsuchiya reported; the company’s site also highlights its Forsyths stills. There are two pot stills, a wash still and a spirit still, and Japanese Wikipedia says the design was modelled on Lagavulin’s. Forsyths had not before been involved from first planning through to training, Tsuchiya reported, and its president, Richard Forsyth, told him the firm saw Akkeshi “as our own distillery.”

Tsuchiya’s 2020 account describes six stainless-steel washbacks, a malt bill split roughly half peated and half unpeated, and peated malt at 50 parts per million phenol. Alongside imported malt, the distillery uses Hokkaido-grown two-row barley of the Ryofu variety, first from Furano and, since 2020, also grown in Akkeshi; since 2018 it has worked towards casks made from mizunara oak grown in the town. Japanese Wikipedia adds that a malting building began operating in May 2022, letting the distillery dry its own barley.

The first release, New Born Foundations 1, came out in 2018, Japanese Wikipedia says, and the brand site lists five New Born Foundations bottlings. The first single malt, Sarorunkamuy, followed in February 2020. In October 2020 the distillery began its Twenty-Four Solar Terms series with the single malt Kanro, which Tsuchiya described as volume one. Each release is named after one of the 24 sekki, the seasonal divisions of the traditional calendar, and the series mixes single malts and blends. The Hokkaido Shimbun reported in May 2025 that Rikka, named for the start of summer, was the 19th release; the brand site now lists 24 names, from Kanro to Shūbun, the autumn equinox.

In 2022 The Akkeshi Blended Whisky Shosho was named World’s Best Blended at the World Whiskies Awards, according to the awards’ own list of winners.

Japan’s new distilleries.

The seven names in this group are all Japanese whisky distilleries: Fuji Gotemba, Nagahama, Akkeshi, Shizuoka, Saburomaru, Sakurao and Yuza. Some sit inside long-established drinks companies, some were built by sake or shochu makers adding a new spirit to an old business, and others are newer ventures built specifically to make whisky, in regions far from one another.

The phrase “Japanese whisky” on a label carries more weight than it used to. In 2021 the Japan Spirits & Liqueurs Makers Association introduced a voluntary labelling standard, with a grace period that ended in 2024, under which, English Wikipedia says, a whisky sold as Japanese must be fermented, distilled, matured and bottled in Japan. A distillery’s identity therefore rests not only on its label and its name but on where its spirit is actually made, how long it has been aged and what, if anything, has been blended in.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — who founded the distillery and when, who owns it now, where its whisky is distilled and matured, and how its bottles and labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Season names as a label system.

Kenten Jitsugyo has owned the distillery since it was built; the Hokkaido Shimbun still described it in May 2025 as the company that runs Akkeshi Distillery. Japanese Wikipedia reports that the company built a maturation warehouse at Yamabe, in Furano, in 2021, and cites the Hokkaido Shimbun on plans for a second distillery at Naka-Furano. It also says the distillery received HACCP food-safety certification in January 2022, and that a blend called Kaki no Komoriuta, the “oyster lullaby,” is sold only in the town of Akkeshi.

For the brand, the seasons do much of the work a logo usually does. Each bottle in the series carries the name of a point in the year — Kanro, “cold dew”; Shosho, the end of summer’s heat; Rikka, the start of summer — rather than an age statement, and the brand site sets all 24 names side by side.

For a design guide, Akkeshi shows how a young distillery can build an identity from place and calendar while its stocks mature. Compare Lagavulin, the Islay distillery Japanese Wikipedia names as the model for its stills, and Chichibu, the Saitama craft distillery Tsuchiya cites as an example of the Japanese whisky that became hard to buy. For this guide we use peat brown, sea mist and marsh green with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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