CROSSING BORDERS

They would have looked right at home at any of the 148 whisky distilleries currently operating in Scotland—six onion-shaped copper pot stills sat side by side in a warehouse, heated directly by blazing coal-fired furnaces underneath—were it not for one small detail. At the top of each still’s “swan neck”—where the alcohol vapours from the boiling mash within rise to condense into new-make whisky—were strung shimenawa: sacred straw ropes festooned with shide paper streamers more commonly found adorning Shinto shrines across Japan to ward off evil spirits. Here, at Yoichi Distillery in Hokkaido—regarded as the birthplace of Nikka Whisky—these beatified stills represented something else: the continuation of the vision of Taketsuru Masataka, the godfather of Japanese whisky, in bringing something inherently Scottish and transforming it into something thoroughly Japanese. There…