The Highball in Japan

Arrival

Yokohama, 1861. In the Gankirō (岩亀楼, also read Iwakame-rō: the “Rock Turtle House”), the grandest of the licensed courtesan houses in the Miyozaki pleasure quarter, British officers gathered to welcome the arrival of their fleet are lighting cigars and calling for brandy cut with soda, the fashionable long drink of Victorian Britain. Or so Japanese cocktail histories tell it: no contemporary English diary or newspaper survives to confirm the scene, though the setting, the drink and the officers are all well attested in the treaty port of the time. Nobody yet called it a highball. But the idea has definitely landed: a spirit lengthened, chilled and fizzing, made to be sipped for hours rather than knocked back. It would take a century and a half, the fall of a shogunate, a whisky that flopped, a war and a television actress to turn it into the drink of a nation.

The officers were there because Japan’s doors had been forced open. For more than two centuries the Tokugawa shogunate had kept the country largely closed under sakoku. Then, in 1853, Commodore Matthew Perry arrived, sent by President Millard Fillmore with a very specific set of demands: protection for shipwrecked American sailors, access to coal and provisions, and open ports for U.S. merchant ships. The resulting 1854 Treaty of Kanagawa was strictly a two-nation deal, but once that door was cracked open, everyone else wanted in; within a few short years the European powers had pushed through treaties of their own. Sleepy port towns became international hubs, the old order crumbled, and the Meiji Restoration unleashed a hunger for world trade, modern ideas and Western tastes that would remake Japan as a consumer and industrial power.

Whisky came in on that tide, at first as a rarity poured for the few. Its first real strongholds were the treaty-port hotels, where merchants, naval officers and cosmopolitan locals gathered over imported spirits: Kobe’s Oriental Hotel, already open by early August 1870, when the Dutch firm Van der Vlies & Co. advertised it in the Hiogo News, and Yokohama’s Grand Hotel, which opened on 16 August 1873 on the Bund overlooking the harbour. The highball, in other words, arrived earlier than is often recognised, and the British had a larger hand in it than the conventional American-centred story allows. Brandy-and-soda had set the template. Whisky-and-soda would follow the same path.

The man who turned that template into a craft was Louis Eppinger. German-born, he had emigrated to the United States as a teenager and worked in San Francisco and Portland before the Grand Hotel brought him to Yokohama around 1889-90 to run its new bar. There he trained Japan’s first generation of native bartenders in the finer points of ice, carbonation and Western mixology. During the 1910s many of his apprentices moved on to Tokyo’s Ginza district, staffing early Western-style venues such as Café Printemps, Maison Konosu and Café Lion, and carrying the foundational techniques of Japanese bartending into the capital.

Tokyo’s grandest venues picked up the thread. The Imperial Hotel, opened in 1890 to host foreign dignitaries, put Scotch in front of Japan’s political and corporate elite. The Tokyo Station Hotel followed in 1915 under the management of the Tsukiji Seiyoken group, its bars part of the fast-growing Western drinking culture that the Taishō-era journalist and dramatist Shin Hasegawa, later a mentor to Shōtarō Ikenami, chronicled in his writing on Tokyo’s modernising nightlife and its Seiyoken-run establishments.

By then the drink had made it into print. The most important of the early Japanese guides to Western liquor was Yoshu Chogo-ho (“The Art of Mixing Western Liquor”), compiled by Shintaro Takano and first published in 1905 as an appendix to the larger culinary guide Obei Ryori-ho Zensho. Its 209 or so recipes, adapted for a Japanese audience, include the earliest known Japanese-language recipe for a whisky highball, and it is now recognised as Japan’s earliest known cocktail book. A 1907 expanded edition even added a section of “Rules for Bartenders” that stressed hygiene standards unusual for the period. The highball was in vogue, and it carried an air of modernity and cosmopolitan chic that sake simply could not match.

Invention

By 1923 the moment was ripe for something home-grown. Suntory founder Shinjiro Torii began building Yamazaki, Japan’s first commercial malt distillery; it opened in 1924 with a very specific goal: a whisky distilled for Japanese palates and, just as importantly, built with the highball in mind. His distillery manager, effectively the operation’s master distiller, was Masataka Taketsuru, who had trained in Scotland at Longmorn, Bo’ness and Hazelburn and studied organic chemistry at the University of Glasgow. Taketsuru came home with a complete grasp of malt and grain production, and Torii used it to shape Yamazaki’s early whisky: lighter, more aromatic, and suited to the highball culture taking shape around it.

The first result was Shirofuda (White Label), launched in 1929 as Suntory’s first whisky under a defiantly nationalist slogan: 『断じて舶来を要せず』, “We absolutely do not need imported goods.” It was a direct challenge to the prestige of Scotch. It flopped. Drinkers found it burnt-tasting, sales were poor, and by 1931 production had effectively stalled. The partnership did not last either: in 1934 Taketsuru left to strike out on his own in Hokkaido, founding the company that became Nikka. Torii went back to the drawing board, and in 1937 he got it right. Kakubin, in its tortoiseshell-patterned bottle, would eventually define the Japanese highball style. These domestic whiskies were deliberately lighter and more floral than a heavy Scotch, designed to lift soda water rather than fight it. And because sake and shochu had long been cut with water, a diluted, aromatic spirit felt natural rather than foreign to Japanese palates.

Through the 1930s the serve was refined behind the counter. At Tokyo’s Bar Lupin, Shinzo Ueda poured for a crowd of intellectuals and artists, while Torii’s own bars honed the technique: hand-cut ice, ice-cold soda, tall glasses. The obsessive precision Japanese bartending is famous for today starts here.

The People’s Drink

Then came the Americans. GIs arrived after 1945 hungry for whisky, and because real Scotch was scarce and expensive, local bartenders improvised, folding American cocktail sensibilities into Japanese whisky and aggressively carbonated mineral water. Demand from the occupation forces, together with the gradual recovery of domestic production, set the stage for a genuine whisky boom.

Suntory’s answer was Torys, launched in 1946 and deliberately positioned as an affordable whisky for ordinary drinkers rather than a luxury import. In the 1950s the company built the Torys bar chain, which grew to more than 1,500 outlets across Japan, and it was in these bars that the classic Japanese highball took its enduring form: whisky and soda over ice, almost invariably finished with a slice of lemon. Cheap, refreshing and easy to drink all evening, it was a world away from the prestige spirit of the treaty-port hotels.

At the top of the market, the grand hotels were turning the same drink into something close to an art. At the Palace Hotel, Kiyoshi Imai brought to the highball the obsessive attention to temperature that defined his famous Martinis: the spirit thoroughly chilled in advance, ice-cold soda, clear ice, and the minimum of stirring, so that the drink lost none of its character. Imai was never principally a highball specialist, yet his cult of extreme cold helped shape the precise, temperature-driven style that became the Japanese highball’s hallmark.

As the economy took off, the highball found its natural habitat. Through the high-growth era it became the default drink of the salaryman’s nomikai, the after-work drinking sessions that were central to corporate bonding. A highball cost roughly half the price of a proper cocktail, could be drunk in volume without incapacitating the drinker, and showed off the lighter, more aromatic profile of Japanese whisky. In a booming economy it felt modern and aspirational in a way that sake, increasingly old-fashioned to younger workers, no longer did.

The 1970s took it deeper into everyday life. Whisky consumption kept climbing through the decade, helped by advertising that presented the spirit as a modern, ordinary drink rather than a foreign luxury. From the 1970s into the 1990s, sunakku (snack) bars multiplied: small, often counter-focused places that combined light food, whisky and hostess service. It was in these neighbourhood bars that mizuwari (whisky and water) and the bottle-keep system became widespread, with a regular’s own bottle waiting on the shelf, weaving whisky, in a tall glass with water or with soda, into the rhythm of ordinary nights out.

Behind the finest counters, the craft kept sharpening. Kazuo Uyeda (born 1944), who began his career at Tokyo Kaikan in 1966 and later opened Tender Bar in Ginza, became one of the defining figures of postwar Japanese bartending. Best known internationally for inventing the Hard Shake, he applied the same philosophy of precision, controlled aeration and temperature management to everything he made. In his book Cocktail Techniques he recommends chilling both the whisky and the soda in advance, so that the ice melts as little as possible and the drink keeps its character. By treating even the simplest serve as a matter of exact technique, Uyeda helped fix the Japanese highball as an exercise in restraint and control.

Fall and Resurrection

Success bred its own backlash. As the economy slumped through the 1990s, younger drinkers turned on the highball as the drink of the ojisan, the uncool, middle-aged salaryman, just as an earlier generation had turned from sake to the highball itself. Beer and shochu sales surged, whisky sales cratered, and the highball all but vanished from Japanese nightlife.

Its rescue was a marketing masterclass. In 2008 Suntory launched a major Kakubin Highball campaign aimed squarely at a new generation. Television commercials cast the actress Koyuki as a stylish bar owner; behind the scenes, Suntory trained staff, standardised the pour and installed highball dispensers in izakayas across the country. At the end of 2008, around 15,000 outlets served highballs. A year later, roughly 60,000 did. Whisky consumption, which by 2008 had fallen to roughly one-sixth of its 1983 peak, began a sustained recovery.

The Drink of a Nation

Today the highball has shed its old identity as a male, office-worker drink and found genuine mass appeal across every part of Japanese society. Students and younger adults routinely reach for one over beer, drawn to something crisp, low-calorie and sugar-free that never feels heavy. Women have taken to it too, liking the way heavy carbonation and cold dilution strip away the burn of neat spirits without losing the flavour. Salarymen still order them after work, of course, but now they share the room with young couples, groups of friends and solo diners. Light, low-alcohol and on tap in nearly every izakaya and ramen shop in the country, the highball has become as much a palate cleanser for rich food as a drink in its own right.

It succeeded because it fitted Japan at every level: affordable, endlessly sessionable, perfectly matched to the light, floral character of Japanese whisky under heavy carbonation, and in tune with the core values of Japanese hospitality: restraint, meticulous technique, effortless elegance.

Walk into almost any izakaya tonight and you will hear it before you see it: the hiss of the dispenser, the rattle of ice, a slice of lemon dropped into a tall, sweating glass. The British officers at the Gankirō would recognise the idea. They would not recognise the drink. Japan did not simply borrow a Western habit; it reimagined it through its own lens of taste and ritual and, in doing so, created one of its most distinctive gifts to the world’s drinking culture.

Want the earlier chapters? Read The Highball Inheritance, the five-century story of how the highball came to be. New to whisky? Download our free Whisky 101 guide.

Sources

• Hotel New Grand (Yokohama) official history: hotel-newgrand.co.jp
• Oriental Hotel (Kobe) history: Wikipedia and contemporary Hiogo News advertisements (Van der Vlies & Co., August 1870).
• Grand Hotel Yokohama opening date and location: Old Tokyo / Old Photos of Japan references and contemporary accounts.
• Imperial Hotel history: imperialhotel.co.jp
• Louis Eppinger background: San Francisco Call obituary (17 June 1908); Oxford Companion to Spirits & Cocktails; Tokyo Cocktails / Coldicott.net.
• Yoshu Chogo-ho (1905 / 1907): Japanese cocktail histories and secondary scholarship recognising it as Japan’s earliest known cocktail manual; contains the first Japanese-language whisky highball recipe.
• 1861 Miyozaki / Gankirō brandy-and-soda anecdote: Japanese cocktail histories (including Catman blog translation and related secondary Japanese sources); contemporary context of British presence in Yokohama supported by Royal Hampshire Regiment records and Yamate garrison history.
• Shin Hasegawa: Taishō-era journalist and dramatist; wrote about Tokyo bar culture and Seiyoken-run establishments.
• Shirofuda (1929) and nationalist slogan: Suntory company history and contemporary Japanese whisky histories; commercial failure and subsequent development of Kakubin (1937).
• Torys brand (1946) and Torys bar chain (1950s, over 1,500 outlets): Suntory historical accounts and secondary Japanese whisky histories.
• Kiyoshi Imai and temperature control philosophy: Edagawa Koichi, Nihon Matini Densetsu: Top Bartender Imai Kiyoshi no Waza (Shogakukan, 2001) and secondary accounts of his martini technique and broader influence.
• Kazuo Uyeda: Oxford Companion to Spirits & Cocktails; Cocktail Techniques (English translation); Hard Shake documentation; recommendation to pre-chill whisky and soda for highballs.
• Sunakku (snack) bars, 1970s to 1990s, and their role in whisky consumption, mizuwari and the bottle-keep system: Nippon.com (“Whisky, a Spirit Imbued with Culture”) and related Japanese social histories.
• 2008 Kakubin Highball campaign: Suntory internal accounts and contemporary reporting; outlets rising from about 15,000 (end 2008) to about 60,000 (end 2009); whisky consumption recovery from about one-sixth of its 1983 peak.
• Additional corroborative material on British garrison presence, treaty-port drinking culture and early Japanese bartending lineages drawn from secondary Japanese and English-language cocktail and hotel histories, used only where consistent with primary or near-primary evidence.

© 2026 Birchwood Stanhope Limited. All rights reserved. Written by Daniel Merson.