Few names come up as often in discussions of Japanese whisky labelling as Matsui Shuzo (松井酒造), the Tottori-based maker behind the Kurayoshi, Tottori, and Matsui brands. That is not because the company has been found to have broken any law — Japan did not have a legal definition of “Japanese whisky” until 2021, and even that definition remains a voluntary industry standard rather than a statute. It is because Matsui Shuzo’s early marketing became one of the cases trade press pointed to most often when explaining why that standard was needed in the first place, and because the company’s own production has changed substantially since then. This piece lays out what happened, in the order it happened, with sources for each claim, and where things stand now.
We have not tasted Matsui Shuzo’s whisky and make no claim about its quality. This is a history of a labelling dispute, not a review, and nothing here should be read as an accusation that current Matsui Shuzo products are fraudulent.
Who is Matsui Shuzo
Matsui Shuzo Gomei Kaisha is a spirits producer founded in March 1910, with a shochu- and liqueur-focused history that runs alongside its whisky operation today. The company’s whisky production is based at a facility in Kurayoshi (倉吉), a city in Tottori Prefecture on Japan’s San’in coast, which it calls the Kurayoshi Distillery. According to the company’s own account of its history, it obtained its first whisky distillation licence in 2015, followed by a second licence for its Kurayoshi facility in 2018. Its head office is listed in Osaka, with production based in Tottori. Like several other Japanese drinks companies that moved into whisky during the 2010s, Matsui Shuzo entered the category from an adjacent one — shochu and liqueurs — rather than as a purpose-built whisky house, a pattern our index of Japan’s whisky distilleries covers across dozens of similar producers.
How the Kurayoshi and Tottori brands were first marketed
The detail that trade press has returned to most often is the gap between when Matsui Shuzo began selling whisky under the Kurayoshi and Tottori names and when it began actually distilling whisky on its own equipment. Reporting by Nomunication, an English-language Japanese whisky trade publication, in December 2018 described bottles sold under those names as carrying references to “Made in Nippon” and to “Kurayoshi Distillery,” without the words “Distilled in Japan” appearing on the label. The same reporting found that Matsui Shuzo’s English-language website at the time included a section titled “Greeting from the Distiller,” while the Japanese-language version of the same page was titled “greeting from the staff,” a difference Nomunication read as an attempt to imply a distiller’s presence to English-reading audiences that the Japanese-language page did not make.
Nomunication’s account states that Matsui Shuzo did not begin distilling its own spirit at Kurayoshi until 2017, initially on three 1,000-litre pot stills, later adding 3,000-litre and 5,000-litre stills as production scaled up. Bottles sold before that point, under this account, would have used whisky sourced from outside Japan, most likely Scotland, then blended or bottled domestically — a practice that was not illegal under Japan’s liquor tax law at the time, which regulated whisky broadly without specifying where distillation had to occur. Nomunication also reported that Kurayoshi and Tottori bottles were placed in Japanese duty-free retail alongside established Japanese single malts such as Yamazaki, at competitive prices, which the outlet argued added to the potential for confusion among buyers who read “Kurayoshi Distillery” on the label as a claim about where the liquid itself was made.
The 2016 backlash
According to both Nomunication’s reporting and a 2025 Japanese-language retrospective published by the blog Osake Meguri, controversy escalated in 2016 when a company-published essay responded to criticism from whisky enthusiasts questioning the brand’s claims. Nomunication’s translation characterizes the essay as describing critical commentary from Japanese whisky fans as “a big pain in the ass for us makers.” The Japanese-language retrospective describes a similarly toned remark attributed to the company’s president, paraphrased as dismissing detailed fan commentary as a nuisance. Both sources agree the essay spread widely on Japanese social media and messageboards and significantly amplified scrutiny of the brand beyond the original labelling questions. We have not been able to locate an archived copy of the original essay ourselves, so this section relies on how the two outlets independently characterized it rather than on a primary-source quotation.
What the JSLMA standard requires, and when it arrived
None of the above was governed by a defined standard at the time it happened. That changed in February 2021, when the Japan Spirits & Liqueurs Makers Association (JSLMA, 日本洋酒酒造組合) published its “Standards for Labeling Japanese Whisky.” We cover the standard’s six requirements in full in our guide to what counts as Japanese whisky, but the short version is that a product can only use the term if its malting, water sourcing, mashing, fermentation, distillation, and at least three years of cask aging in Japan-based wooden casks of 700 litres or less all take place in Japan, with bottling also happening domestically at 40% ABV or higher. JSLMA members had a three-year transition period to comply, ending March 31, 2024. The standard is not law, and it only binds companies that belong to JSLMA — as of March 2025, the association reported 104 member companies, and trade coverage lists Matsui Shuzo among them.
Because the standard postdates the events described above by several years, it does not retroactively apply to how Kurayoshi and Tottori bottles were labelled in 2016 through 2018. What it does is give both the company and outside observers a fixed, published bar to measure current and future releases against — which is the lens the rest of this piece uses.
Where production stands now
By Matsui Shuzo’s own account, in-house distillation at Kurayoshi has continued and expanded since 2017. The company introduced a distinct “Matsui” single malt line in November 2018, which Nomunication’s reporting describes the company itself framing as a “sub-Japanese whisky” category because its malt is imported even where distillation and finishing happen domestically — a more explicit disclosure than the earlier Kurayoshi and Tottori labelling. The Japanese-language retrospective from Osake Meguri, published in April 2025, describes the company as having since added ingredient-sourcing and production-process detail to its product descriptions, which it frames as a transparency improvement over the pre-2017 period. A July 2024 company press release announced plans to build a new production facility on a former junior high school site in the town of Yurihama, Tottori, on roughly 27,000 square meters of land. The release states the company currently runs five stills in the prefecture and plans to add up to twenty more by 2029, a scale-up the release frames around increasing whisky output rather than around the earlier labelling questions specifically.
How to read a bottle from this family of brands today
The practical takeaway is the same one that applies to any Japanese whisky purchase: read the category wording on the label, not the brand story. Our guide to spotting a bottle that is not really Japanese whisky covers this in detail, but the short version for this family of brands specifically is to check whether a given bottle uses a JSLMA-compliant category descriptor, whether it names a specific distillery, and whether its age statement (if any) is consistent with when that distillery’s own stills were actually running.
| Brand line | How it is described | Spirit source (per available reporting) | Sold since |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kurayoshi | Single malt, distillery-named | Imported pre-2017; in-house Kurayoshi distillate as production scaled | 2015 onward |
| Tottori | Blended whisky | Imported and domestic blend, per company statements | 2016 onward |
| Matsui | Single malt, labelled “sub-Japanese whisky” by the company | Imported malt, domestically finished, per company framing | November 2018 onward |
Frequently asked questions
Q: Did Matsui Shuzo break the law with its early Kurayoshi and Tottori labelling?
A: No law was broken. Japan’s liquor tax law at the time regulated what could be called “whisky” broadly but did not specify where distillation had to take place for a bottle to say so. The JSLMA labelling standard that addresses this gap was not published until February 2021, several years after the labelling that trade press criticized, and it remains a voluntary industry standard rather than a law.
Q: Is Matsui Shuzo currently a JSLMA member?
A: Trade coverage lists Matsui Shuzo among the Japan Spirits & Liqueurs Makers Association’s member companies, which had grown to 104 members as of March 2025 according to the association’s own announcement. JSLMA membership means a company has committed to following the labelling standard for any product it markets as Japanese whisky.
Q: Does Kurayoshi whisky contain any whisky actually distilled in Japan?
A: According to Nomunication’s reporting, Matsui Shuzo began distilling its own spirit at the Kurayoshi facility in 2017, several years after the Kurayoshi brand name first appeared on shelves. Bottles released since then may contain a growing proportion of in-house distillate, though the company has not published a bottle-by-bottle breakdown that we are aware of, so buyers checking a specific release should look for the category wording and any distillery statement on that bottle’s own label.
Q: What is the “Matsui” line, and how is it different from Kurayoshi?
A: Matsui is a single malt line the company introduced in November 2018, which Nomunication’s reporting describes the company itself framing as a “sub-Japanese whisky” because its malt is imported even though distillation and finishing take place in Japan. That framing is a more explicit disclosure of sourcing than the earlier Kurayoshi and Tottori marketing, which did not state a spirit origin as clearly.
Sources
- Nomunication, “Matsui Shuzo and the phantom Kurayoshi Distillery,” December 2018
- Nomunication, “Red flags to watch for in ‘Japanese’ whisky labels,” December 2022
- 日本洋酒酒造組合 (JSLMA), “ウイスキーにおけるジャパニーズウイスキーの表示に関する基準,” February 2021 (Japanese)
- 松井酒造合名会社, company press release on new Tottori production facility, PR TIMES, July 2024 (Japanese)
- お酒巡り (Osake Meguri), “松井酒造（倉吉蒸留所）の過去の炎上から現在の取り組みまで徹底解説,” April 2025 (Japanese)
- Business Wire, “Japan Spirits & Liqueurs Makers Association (JSLMA) Reinforces Standards for Labeling Japanese Whisky With New Logo,” March 2025
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