Japanese whisky distilleries: the full list by region

Ten years ago, a list of Japan’s whisky distilleries would have fit on an index card: Suntory’s two sites, Nikka’s two, Kirin’s one, and a handful of small operators trying to survive on shochu and sake sales while whisky waited out a decades-long domestic slump. That list no longer fits on anything short of a spreadsheet. Trade press reported in February 2026 that more than 130 distilleries are now making whisky in Japan, while a separate distillery map published the same year counted 168 licensed sites nationwide, a figure its own author cautions includes anyone who has “acquired a license to produce whisky,” not necessarily anyone currently distilling.

That gap between counts is the first thing worth understanding about this list. Nobody, including the associations that publish these figures, claims to have an exact, agreed number. What is not in dispute is the shape of the growth: a single new distillery, Chichibu, in 2008; then a slow trickle through the early 2010s; then a wave of openings concentrated between roughly 2016 and 2020, as sake and shochu makers across the country applied for whisky licenses at a pace the industry had not seen since before the Second World War.

Counting distilleries is harder than it sounds, and it is worth being upfront about why before the table below. Japan’s National Tax Agency issues whisky manufacturing licenses, and a license is not the same thing as a working still. Some license holders are large, established sake or shochu producers testing the waters with a small batch or two; some are still building out equipment; a few have quietly let plans stall. Membership in the Japan Spirits & Liqueurs Makers Association (JSLMA, 日本洋酒酒造組合), the body behind the 2021 labelling standard, is a reasonable proxy for a company that intends to sell whisky as whisky, but it is voluntary, and plenty of legitimate small producers are not yet members. That is why every credible count of Japan’s distilleries lands in a range rather than a single figure, and why we treat the numbers below as directional rather than exact.

This page is our index to that landscape: a region-by-region table of operating distilleries, a look at what separates the legacy producers from the new wave, and a direct route into every distillery guide we have published so far.

Japan’s whisky distilleries, region by region

The table below groups distilleries by Japan’s standard geographic regions. It is not a census of all 130-plus licensed operators — many are too new, too small, or too undocumented in English to verify with confidence yet — but it covers every distillery we have researched in depth, plus a small number of well-documented additional sites, so every region of the country is represented. “Started” marks the year whisky distillation began at that site, which in several cases is not the same year the parent company itself was founded.

Hokkaido

Distillery	Prefecture	Started	Owner
Yoichi	Hokkaido	1934	Nikka Whisky Distilling
Akkeshi	Hokkaido	2016	Kenten Jitsugyo

Tohoku

Distillery	Prefecture	Started	Owner
Miyagikyo	Miyagi	1969	Nikka Whisky Distilling
Asaka	Fukushima	2016	Sasanokawa Shuzo
Yuza	Yamagata	2017	Kinryu Co., Ltd.

Kanto

Distillery	Prefecture	Started	Owner
Chichibu	Saitama	2008	Venture Whisky
Nukada (guide)	Ibaraki	2016	Kiuchi Shuzo

Chubu

Distillery	Prefecture	Started	Owner
Saburomaru	Toyama	1952	Wakatsuru Shuzo
Hakushu	Yamanashi	1973	Suntory
Fuji Gotemba	Shizuoka	1973	Kirin (Kirin Distillery)
Mars Shinshu	Nagano	1985	Hombo Shuzo
Shizuoka	Shizuoka	2016	Gaiaflow

Kinki

Distillery	Prefecture	Started	Owner
Eigashima White Oak	Hyogo	1919	Eigashima Shuzo
Yamazaki	Osaka	1923	Suntory
Kaikyo	Hyogo	2017	Akashi Sake Brewery
Nagahama	Shiga	2016	Nagahama Roman Beer

Chugoku-Shikoku

Distillery	Prefecture	Started	Owner
Okayama	Okayama	2011	Miyashita Sake Brewing
Kurayoshi (Matsui) (guide)	Tottori	2017	Matsui Shuzo
Sakurao	Hiroshima	2018	Sakurao Brewery & Distillery

Kyushu

Distillery	Prefecture	Started	Owner
Tsunuki	Kagoshima	2016	Hombo Shuzo
Kanosuke	Kagoshima	2017	Komasa Jyozo

Beyond this list sit dozens more distilleries in various stages of operation, from newly licensed startups with no whisky old enough to bottle yet, to long-running shochu and sake houses still deciding whether to sell what they distill as whisky at all. We are working through them region by region and will add rows as each one gets the same research treatment as the distilleries above.

Big three houses versus the new wave

Two very different kinds of company sit on this list, and confusing them leads to bad assumptions about price, availability, and style. Suntory, Nikka, and Kirin built their distilleries between 1923 and 1985, run them at industrial scale, and hold the vast majority of aged stock in the country. Their whisky, Yamazaki, Hakushu, Yoichi, Miyagikyo, and Fuji Gotemba, is what built Japanese whisky’s international reputation, and it remains the easiest to find on shelves in the US, UK, and EU, even with age-statement bottlings running short.

The new wave is almost entirely different in structure. Most of the distilleries that opened from 2016 onward were not built by drinks conglomerates. They were built by sake breweries, shochu makers, and even a craft beer brewer, companies that already held distilling licenses or brewing infrastructure and pivoted into whisky as domestic demand for their original products shrank. Sasanokawa Shuzo had brewed sake since 1765 before it used a 1946 whisky license. Miyashita Sake Brewing added whisky as its fourth category, after sake, beer, and beer spirits. Komasa Jyozo and Hombo Shuzo both came from shochu. That lineage shows up in the whisky itself: many new-wave distilleries season casks with sherry, shochu, or local fruitwood rather than following Scotch-style conventions strictly, and several publish far more detail about their process on Japanese-language pages than any English source has translated.

Scale is the other real difference. A big-house distillery like Hakushu can run continuously across multiple large pot stills; several new-wave sites, Nagahama and Chichibu among them, are built around stills small enough that a single day’s run barely fills a handful of casks. That is why so many new-wave bottles carry no age statement, sell out within days of release, and rarely reach export markets in meaningful volume, not because the whisky is inferior, but because there simply is not much of it yet.

The motivation behind each new-wave opening tends to fall into one of two categories, and knowing which one applies to a given distillery is a useful shortcut to understanding its whisky. The first is defensive: a regional sake or shochu maker watching its home market shrink and adding whisky as a new revenue line that can sell nationally, or overseas, in a way a purely local product cannot. Kinryu, the company behind Yuza distillery in Yamagata, has been explicit about this, with roughly 95 percent of its sake and shochu sales concentrated in a single prefecture before it pivoted. The second is closer to ambition: a company with genuine distilling infrastructure already in place, from beer or shochu production, deciding whisky is a category it can compete in on quality rather than survival. Kaikyo, built by a hundred-year-old sake brewer in Hyogo at the point its business turned a century old, reads more like the second case than the first, even though both stories start from the same underlying pressure: a domestic market that no longer guarantees growth on its own.

Where to start reading

With close to twenty distillery guides published and more added regularly, here is a shortcut by what you are actually curious about.

New to Japanese whisky entirely: start with the two distilleries that carry the country’s whisky history, Yoichi, where Masataka Taketsuru built Nikka’s first site with coal-fired stills, and Miyagikyo, the second Nikka distillery he designed to be Yoichi’s structural opposite. Pair either with our guide to Hakushu, Suntory’s forest distillery, to see how the two biggest producers deliberately built distinct houses rather than duplicating what already worked.

Chasing peat, Islay-style: Akkeshi was built on Hokkaido wetlands specifically to echo Islay, and Saburomaru in Toyama has built its whole identity around heavily peated single malt from a distinctive cast copper still.

Interested in sake and shochu makers turned distillers: this is where most of the new wave lives. Asaka revived a whisky license held dormant for seventy years by a 1765 sake brewery; Eigashima White Oak has held a license since 1919 but stayed deliberately small; Nagahama runs Portuguese alembic stills out of a former brewpub on Lake Biwa; Okayama and Kaikyo both came from century-old sake houses in western Japan; and Sakurao makes single malt and gin side by side on Hiroshima Bay.

Shochu roots rather than sake: Kanosuke, Japan’s only beachfront distillery, and Tsunuki, built on Hombo Shuzo’s own 1872 founding site in Kagoshima, both trace back to shochu production before whisky.

Craft-scale and hard to find: Chichibu remains the distillery collectors chase hardest, and Shizuoka, which runs a still salvaged from the closed Karuizawa distillery alongside a wood-fired still, is not far behind it for scarcity.

Unusual production setups: Mars Shinshu is Japan’s highest-altitude distillery at roughly 798 meters in the Central Alps, and Fuji Gotemba is the only site in the country that distills both malt and grain whisky under one roof.

A regional market betting on whisky to survive: Yuza in Yamagata is worth a look for exactly the reason described above, a sake maker turning to whisky as its home prefecture’s population shrinks, built at the foot of Mount Chokai on snowmelt water the Japanese government has ranked among the country’s best.

Trying to understand the rules before you buy: read our breakdown of what actually counts as Japanese whisky and how to spot a bottle that is not really Japanese whisky before you assume a label’s country claim.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• The Spirits Business, “Scaling up: Japan’s new wave of whisky distilleries,” February 2026
• Nomunication, “New Japanese Whisky Distillery Map shows 168 distilleries across Japan,” May 2026
• 日本洋酒酒造組合 (Japan Spirits & Liqueurs Makers Association), self-regulatory standards page, yoshu.or.jp (Japanese)
• ウイスキー文化研究所, “ウイスキーコニサー 最新蒸留所資料 2026” press release, PR TIMES (Japanese)