Asaka distillery (安積蒸溜所) sits in Koriyama, Fukushima, and it is not a startup. It is a 1946 whisky license that spent nearly three decades dormant before a sake brewery decided to use it properly. Sasanokawa Shuzo (笹の川酒造), the company that holds that license, had already been making sake for over 200 years when it first turned to whisky, and its 2016 return to distilling was framed by the current president as an obligation, not an opportunity. That framing matters more than any tasting note, because it explains almost every choice the distillery has made since.
What is Asaka distillery
Asaka distillery is a small malt whisky operation owned by Sasanokawa Shuzo, a sake and shochu producer based in Koriyama, in Japan’s Tohoku region. The company traces its brewing history to 1710, when it was founded south of Lake Inawashiro, and moved to its current site in Koriyama in 1765. Whisky is a relatively recent addition to that history: Sasanokawa first obtained a whisky manufacturing license in 1946, let large-scale distilling lapse for decades, then rebuilt a proper malt whisky distillery in 2016. Readers meeting Japanese whisky for the first time may want our guide to what actually counts as Japanese whisky before going further, since Asaka’s own history runs straight through the loosely regulated decades that guide explains.
A 1946 license born of rice shortages, not ambition
Sasanokawa’s move into whisky was not a peacetime lifestyle choice. In 1946, postwar Japan was short of rice, and rice is the base ingredient of sake. Brewers across the country looked for other products to keep their businesses running, and whisky, which could be built around imported malt, molasses-based spirit, or grain neutral alcohol rather than rice, was one answer. The license was granted to Yamazakura Shuzo, the company’s name at the time, before it was reorganized as Sasanokawa Shuzo in 1966.
That license found its commercial footing in the postwar decades through a brand called Cherry Whisky, sold in part to American servicemen stationed near Fukushima. Cherry Whisky became well known enough in Japan’s regional whisky scene of the era that it was grouped with two other local brands in a common shorthand: “Kita no Cherry, Higashi no Toa, Nishi no Mars” — the Cherry of the north, the Toa of the east, the Mars of the west. It was a real business, not a curiosity, but it was built on blending and bottling rather than sustained in-house distilling, and as Japan’s domestic whisky market went into its long slump after the early 1980s, Sasanokawa’s own new-make production quietly stopped. The license stayed on the books. The distilling did not.
Why 2016, and why Yamaguchi decided it was Sasanokawa’s turn
The decision to build a real malt whisky distillery again came from company president Yamaguchi Tetsuzo, the tenth generation to lead the brewery, who took the name Tetsuzo in 2015 as the company marked its 250th anniversary. By his own account, several things lined up at once: rising international demand for Japanese whisky, the symbolic weight of the 250th-anniversary year, and what he has described as a sense of duty as a Japanese alcohol producer to make the category properly rather than leave it to larger companies. Encouragement also came from Ichiro Akuto, the founder of Chichibu distillery and one of the best-known figures in Japan’s craft whisky revival, whose own distillery guide tells a parallel story of a shuttered family license rebuilt from almost nothing.
Sasanokawa kept the 2016 build deliberately lean. Rather than commission a purpose-built plant, the company converted an existing sake storage warehouse into the distillery building and reused a sake fermentation tank as a whisky washback. Only the pot stills and the mash tun were bought new. It is a detail that says something specific about the project: this was not a prestige investment aimed at flagship export bottles, it was an existing sake maker retrofitting its own infrastructure to finally use a seventy-year-old license the way it always could have been used.
The Asaka plain: a name that points to reclaimed, not scenic, land
The distillery takes its name from the Asaka plain (安積平野) on which Koriyama sits, and the plain’s own history explains why the name carries weight locally rather than functioning as a marketing flourish. Through the Meiji era, the area was known as the Asaka wasteland (安積原野), agriculturally unproductive land that only became farmable after the completion of the Asaka Canal (安積疏水) in 1882, an irrigation project that carried water from Lake Inawashiro and is still counted among Japan’s three great Meiji-era canal works. Sasanokawa’s own account of its history ties the family directly into that reclamation effort: one of the twenty-five founding members of Kaiseisha, the settlers’ association behind the canal project, is identified as an ancestor of the current president.
That lineage is why the distillery’s public messaging leans on endurance rather than scenery. One line from the company’s own account of the Asaka project, translated here, reads: “we believe that once the boom settles, what will be tested is our passion for whisky-making, and our love for the land that raised it.” It is a statement built for a brewery whose whisky license predates almost every other Japanese craft distillery by decades, and whose land was itself made usable by generations of deliberate, unglamorous work before a single still went in.
Yamazakura: the brand name is the pre-1966 company itself
Sasanokawa did not invent a new name for its whisky. The flagship brand, YAMAZAKURA (山桜, “mountain cherry”), is the name of the company as it existed when the original 1946 license was granted: Yamazakura Shuzo. When the business reorganized as Sasanokawa Shuzo in 1966, the older name did not disappear, it moved onto the whisky bottles. Using it again for the 2016 relaunch was not a rebrand so much as a restoration, a way of putting the license’s original identity back on the product it was always meant to produce. Current single malt releases under the Yamazakura and Yamazakura Asaka names include both non-peated and heavily peated expressions, along with limited cask-finish editions such as wine cask bottlings, reflecting a small operation using variety to build a range rather than relying on scale.
How Asaka compares to Japan’s other rebuilt and restarted distilleries
Asaka is not the only Japanese whisky project built on an older company’s back rather than from a clean corporate start. Several of the country’s newer distilleries share a version of the same pattern: an existing sake, shochu, or spirits business, adding or reviving a whisky license.
| Distillery | Prefecture | Parent business | Whisky timeline |
|---|---|---|---|
| Asaka | Fukushima | Sasanokawa Shuzo, sake brewer since 1765 | License 1946, distillery rebuilt 2016 |
| Chichibu | Saitama | Venture Whisky, founded by Ichiro Akuto | Distillery opened 2008 |
| Mars Shinshu | Nagano | Hombo Shuzo, shochu maker since 1872 | Distillery opened 1985, mothballed 1992-2011 |
| Yuza | Yamagata | Kinryu, a group of local sake makers | Distillery opened 2018 |
Read against that table, Asaka’s story is less about novelty and more about patience: it holds the oldest license of the group by a wide margin, and it is the only one of the four where the current distillery is explicitly a reactivation of the original, rather than a new build under an older company’s name. Readers curious how these production choices show up on the shelf, rather than in the history books, may also want our look at Mars Shinshu or Yuza for two very different versions of the same rebuilding pattern.
What this means for a bottle in your glass
None of this tells you what Yamazakura tastes like, and we have not tasted it ourselves, so we will not pretend otherwise. What the history does explain is what you are paying for when you choose a bottle carrying a seventy-year-old license number rather than a distillery founded specifically to chase the export market: a brewery whose whisky-making has always been secondary to, and funded by, a much older sake business, restarted by a family that frames the decision as duty rather than opportunity, on land whose own usability was hard-won. For a reader deciding between Japan’s small craft distilleries, that is a genuinely different starting point from a purpose-built newcomer, and it is worth knowing before the bottle, not after it.
Frequently asked questions
Q: Is Asaka distillery the same as Yamazakura whisky?
A: They are connected but not identical terms. Asaka distillery is the physical production site in Koriyama, Fukushima, owned by Sasanokawa Shuzo. Yamazakura is the brand name used on the bottles, taken from the company’s own name before it reorganized as Sasanokawa Shuzo in 1966. In practice, current Yamazakura and Yamazakura Asaka single malt releases are the whisky Asaka distillery produces.
Q: Why did Asaka distillery stop making whisky for so long?
A: Sasanokawa Shuzo obtained its whisky license in 1946 mainly to work around postwar rice shortages that hurt sake production. The resulting Cherry Whisky brand sold reasonably well through the mid-20th century, but as Japan’s overall whisky market went into a long decline after the early 1980s, the company’s own new-make distilling quietly stopped, even though the license itself remained valid and was eventually used again in 2016.
Q: What does the name Asaka refer to?
A: Asaka refers to the Asaka plain around Koriyama, historically called the Asaka wasteland until the 1882 completion of the Asaka Canal made it farmable by carrying water from Lake Inawashiro. The current company president’s family is described as having an ancestor among the founding members of the settlers’ association behind that canal project, which is part of why the distillery carries the plain’s name rather than a more generic regional label.
Q: Is Asaka whisky peated or unpeated?
A: Asaka distillery makes both. Its Yamazakura and Yamazakura Asaka single malt lines include non-peated expressions alongside heavily peated ones, plus occasional cask-finish limited editions such as wine cask bottlings. Running both styles at a small distillery is one sign of a production team building a varied range rather than a single signature profile.
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