Kaikyo distillery: how a sake brewery built Hatozaki whisky

Kaikyo (海峡) distillery sits at the foot of the Akashi Kaikyo Bridge, the suspension bridge that spans the Akashi Strait between the mainland and Awaji Island. The name is literal: Kaikyo simply means “strait.” But the whisky it makes is not sold under that name, or under “Akashi” either, even though the distillery is in Akashi city and run by a company whose flagship sake is called Akashi-Tai. It is sold as Hatozaki, and the reason for that gap between distillery, city, and brand name is itself a useful way into how this company thinks.

A soy sauce and money-changing business that became a sake brewer, then a distiller

The company behind Kaikyo distillery, Akashi Sake Brewery, did not start in alcohol at all. Its own company history traces the business back to 1856, when the Yonezawa family ran a soy sauce brewing and money-changing operation in Akashi. The business was incorporated in 1918 as a shochu and mirin maker, and it was not until 1960 that it launched the Akashi-Tai sake line that the brewery is still best known for in Japan, followed by ginjo grade in 1996 and junmai daiginjo in 2006.

Whisky came late, and deliberately so. In 2017, at roughly the hundred-year mark from its 1918 incorporation, the company obtained a whisky and spirits manufacturing licence and began distilling at a new site it named Kaikyo distillery, with an export-focused whisky reaching international markets from 2018. The Dutch drinks group Marussia Beverages, which also owns the Torabhaig distillery on Skye, took a capital stake in the project around the same time. Rather than a sake brewer bolting on a whisky line to chase a trend, the company frames 2017 as a centennial move, a new chapter added at the point its shochu and sake business turned a hundred.

That timing puts Kaikyo in a specific position within the broader Japanese whisky boom. Much of the current wave of new distilleries opened between roughly 2016 and 2020, as international demand for Japanese whisky outpaced the limited stock built by Suntory and Nikka decades earlier, and a wide range of drinks companies, sake breweries, shochu makers, even a beer brewer, moved into whisky at once. Akashi Sake Brewery’s version of that move is distinguished mainly by depth of prior brewing history: a business with a documented line back to 1856 is a different starting point from a distillery built purely as a new venture, even if the whisky itself is equally young in cask-age terms.

Kimio Yonezawa’s approach: Western technique, regional Japanese material

The distillery is run by Kimio Yonezawa, of the same Yonezawa family that has owned the business since the 19th century, who has spent more than three decades working across distillation and blending. The company describes his method as combining distilling traditions learned through travel and study abroad with ingredients and influences specific to the Akashi region, rather than importing a Scottish process wholesale or staying purely local. Its own stated philosophy is blunt about why this matters: “sharing knowledge, techniques and traditions across borders is how we truly preserve our craft.” That is a working definition of the company’s whisky project, not just a slogan; it treats going abroad to learn distilling as compatible with, rather than a threat to, the sake and shochu heritage the business already had.

The same team also makes gin at Kaikyo, and the company says it applies the same standard of care to both spirits, using the newer, less tradition-bound category of gin as a place to experiment more freely while whisky stock matures in cask.

That sequencing is worth noting on its own. A distillery that launches whisky and gin in the same year, from a standing start, is usually reaching for gin because whisky needs years in cask before there is anything to sell, and a young operation needs revenue in the meantime. Kaikyo does not hide this; it presents gin as a genuine second craft rather than a stopgap, but the practical effect is the same one every new Japanese distillery of the past decade has had to manage: keep the business alive on faster-turnaround spirits while the whisky that will define the brand sits quietly in warehouse.

Why a strait, a bridge, and hot, humid summers matter for the spirit

Kaikyo distillery sits directly on the Seto Inland Sea, close enough to the water that the distillery’s own materials describe maritime winds off the strait as part of the ageing environment. The company characterises the local climate as dry, temperate winters and hot, humid summers, a coastal seasonal swing rather than the inland mountain conditions found at many other Japanese distilleries. Being positioned at the narrowest crossing point of the strait, directly under the bridge that gave the distillery its name, is presented by the company less as scenery and more as the reason the site was chosen in the first place: a maritime location for a maritime climate, in a stretch of water the company clearly wanted to be identified with.

The company opened a dedicated visitor centre alongside the distillery in 2022, giving overseas and domestic visitors a way to see the stills and the strait together rather than reading about the location secondhand. For a brand built around a specific stretch of coastline, putting a public-facing building on that coastline is a small but concrete way of backing up the claim rather than leaving it as copy on a label.

Hatozaki, not Akashi: a brand name chosen to avoid a collision

Akashi city already had a whisky maker before Kaikyo distillery existed. Eigashima Shuzo, a separate sake brewer in the same city, obtained a whisky manufacturing licence in 1919, earlier than Suntory’s Yamazaki distillery, and has sold whisky under the name “Akashi” for decades (see our Eigashima White Oak distillery guide). When Akashi Sake Brewery built its own distillery in the same city in 2017, using the city name for its whisky would have put two unrelated Akashi whiskies on shelves at once. The company instead named its whisky Hatozaki, after a stone lighthouse still standing in Akashi’s old harbour. Local heritage records date the current stone lighthouse to 1657, built under the fifth lord of Akashi domain, and rank it among the oldest surviving lighthouses of its kind in Japan; it served as a working aid to navigation for more than 300 years before being retired in the 20th century.

That choice does two things worth separating. Practically, it avoids confusing export customers who might otherwise assume “Akashi whisky” refers to one product. Symbolically, it lets the brand keep a maritime, place-specific story, tied to a real structure that predates the company itself by two centuries, rather than reaching for the city name and hoping context sorts out the rest. The company’s design language for Hatozaki draws on Edo-period visual motifs for the same reason: the lighthouse dates from that period, and the branding follows the object rather than the other way round.

Kaikyo and Eigashima, compared

Because both distilleries operate in Akashi and both started as sake or shochu producers, they are easy to mix up. The gap between them is mostly age and scale of history rather than approach.

Readers new to the category may also want the broader context in our guide to what counts as Japanese whisky under the labelling standard, since brand-name confusion of the kind Kaikyo deliberately avoided is exactly the sort of thing that standard was written to address. Our guide to how to spot fake Japanese whisky covers a related but separate problem: labels designed to look Japanese without qualifying under the standard at all.

What this means for a drinker outside Japan

Hatozaki is one of a smaller group of Japanese whisky brands built by a company with almost no prior whisky history of its own, backed instead by a much longer record in sake and shochu, plus a foreign capital partner with its own distilling operation in Scotland. That combination shows up in the brand’s own choices more than in any tasting claim we would want to make without having sampled it ourselves: a name pulled from local maritime history rather than the city itself, a stated philosophy of learning distilling abroad and applying it at home, and a location chosen specifically for its strait-side climate. For a reader trying to place Hatozaki against distilleries with a century of whisky-making behind them, the honest framing is a young whisky operation grafted onto an old and specific piece of Akashi’s own history, not a new company inventing a heritage story from nothing.

Sources

• Akashi Sake Brewery, company history page, akashi-tai.com (Japanese)
• jwic.jp, Kaikyo distillery profile (Japanese)
• Hyogo Prefecture tourism / Akashi Tourism Association, 旧波門崎燈籠堂 heritage records (Japanese)
• Akashi Sake Brewery, official Kaikyo Distillery and Hatozaki brand pages (English)
• jwic.jp, Eigashima distillery profile and whisky licence history (Japanese)