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01 July 2009
Tokyo Nights
By
Stephan Phelan
Locals say it is the best city to drink whisky in – join us for a whistlestop tour of its best bars
It is raining hard in Tokyo this afternoon, but we are far enough underground to forget about the weather for the moment, like those deep-sea fish that don’t know or care what’s happening at the surface.
The Japanese capital is effectively a split-level city, where you could probably walk for days without emerging from its endless basement of metro tunnels, shopping arcades and streets beneath the streets. Somewhere down here, below Tokyo station, is a 40-year-old specialist whisky shop called Liquors Hasegawa.
Yoichi Motoki guides us there, along crowded corridors at rush hour. Yoichi is a former professional barman who got a job with the importer and distributor Whisk-e Ltd, and went to work on Arran for a couple of years, during which time he had a spell at Springbank and served Society members at The Vaults, our Members’ Rooms in Edinburgh. Yoichi knows the CalMac ferry timetables at least as well as the Tokyo trains, and shares his first name with the Japanese single malt that was voted best in its class at last year’s World Whiskies Awards, although he laughs this off as a happy coincidence.
His employer David Croll has also come along – David, who runs the Society’s branch in Tokyo, will be my interpreter by default. A very tall man, who only seems more so in Japan, David agrees with the local aficionados who believe this is now the greatest city in the world for drinking malts and blends, foreign and domestic. “I don’t think even the people who live here quite realise how much is going on,” he said.
Though generally distilled to Scottish specifications, roughly 80 per cent of whisky sold in this country is Japanese, produced by the drinks giants Nikka and Suntory, or the smaller operations owned by their rivals Kirin and a few independents, such as the relative newcomers Venture.
At Liquors Hasegawa, that rule is basically reversed – almost all of their stock is original Scotch, and it rises to the roof in the pleasing antiquarian way of books in classical libraries, so that staff need stepladders to reach the remotest bottles.
Manager Shusaku Osawa has worked here for 25 years, long enough to watch McDonald’s and Starbucks move in at either side of him, and to see Scottish single malt become affordable, if not exactly cheap. “Some of the customers are getting quite old,” said Shusaku, relying on David to translate and paraphrase. “And a lot of those tend to be traditional blend drinkers, who stick with the same label they’ve always bought.”
Many such loyalist tastes were formed in the brief golden age of the 1980s, when Japan’s world-beating brand of capitalism and high protectionist prices ensured that only captains of industry could pay for higher-end Scotch, which then became a badge of wealth. Tax and trade changes in the following lean decade eventually let the minimum cost of a bottle drop under 10,000 yen (£60, more or less, at least until the recent collapse of the pound), damaging the lucrative luxury gift market while falling within range of the average buyer.
Now younger customers want, and get, the single malts that their elders were largely denied. According to Shusaku, they are “promiscuous” in their purchases. For the last couple of years, he has offered tasting samples from his ever-wider range, starting at a bargain 100 yen per dram – although two is your limit.
Already predisposed to trust a man who wears the black apron of a true shopkeeper, and the esoteric beard of an artisan, I try his recommended 1996 Clynelish with the Lion Rampant on the label, specially bottled for Liquors Hasegawa by a visiting importer. And I might even buy it, if not for the pitiless current exchange rate.
“Banzai!” shouts Shusaku, albeit discreetly, when asked if his regulars have been similarly intimidated by the global financial crisis. He is the first Japanese person I have ever heard use that word outside of war films or TV game shows, and with David away for one last browse, I can only guess that he means their love of whisky is recession-proof, perhaps to the point of outright defiance.
Yoichi leads us back out into heavy foot-traffic, and we take a packed train to Shinjuku. Out at street level, it looks like a digital construct, especially in the rain, with sliding blocks of neon diffused through a canopy of translucent commuter umbrellas. The sight of it famously inspired the set designers for Ridley Scott’s movie Blade Runner. Zoetrope, a small whisky bar on the third floor of a nearby high-rise, is cinematic in its own way, but wilfully unfuturistic.
{{Owner Atsushi Horigami screens silent comedies through a projector while serving the finest and rarest products of Japanese distilleries.}} The black-and-white antics of Keaton and Chaplin don’t usually run in sync with Atsushi’s musical loop of random soundtracks from very different films, like the Vietnam drama Born On The Fourth Of July. Atsushi used to work in film production himself, and later in video-games, before quitting to open a place that would combine his two passions. (“Passion,” David tells me more than once tonight, “is the big thing these days.” He suggests that Japan is even now in the midst of a second “whisky boom”.)
Zoetrope was named after the mechanical device that made the earliest movies possible – Atsushi keeps one behind the bar – which, in turn, comes from a Greek word meaning “wheel of life”. He doesn’t speak English, let alone Gaelic, but does know that uisge beatha translates to “water of life”, and imagines a connection between water and wheel that he finds difficult to explain. Even so, you won’t find any Scotch in here.
“Scotch, Scotch, Scotch,” said Atsushi of most other whisky bars in Tokyo, having dedicated himself to sourcing and pouring the best of his own country. He drives out to family liquor stores in distant rural towns, buys up from the dustiest shelves what the owners consider “dead stock”, and returns with long-forgotten Japanese bottlings that his most informed and obsessive patrons have never seen or heard of.
Since Atsushi’s rivals caught on to this trick, there have been fewer buried treasures to find, but even his better-known stuff is brand new to me. I ask for a glass of Suntory’s Special Mysterious Whisky purely because of the name. It’s a 12-year-old malt made for a Japanese crime writers’ association. “Not particularly mysterious,” as David puts it after a sip, but not at all bad. Nikka’s Peaty And Salty lives up to its title more aggressively.
That language has become an issue, David tells me, in the taxi across town to Minami Aoyama. Until recently, the English whisky vocabulary has been imposed on the Japanese, but standard terms like “smoky” or “sweet” don’t mean quite the same things here – especially, inevitably, references to distinctly British/Scottish foods, sweets and childhood experiences. Local distilleries and writers are developing new frames of reference for Japan’s own tastes and palates that native drinkers will recognise more naturally.
In the Helmsdale, however, the menu is strongly Scottish-inflected: fish and chips, chips and cheese, haggis in Talisker, whisky-flavoured pasta with salmon, cream and Johnnie Walker. Yoichi orders several plates to share, which is customary in Japanese pubs, and a round of real ales from the Yona Yona brewery in Nagano. The manager, Masaki Murasawa, serves us wearing an I ‘heart’ Islay t-shirt.
Masaki has visited more than 50 distilleries in Scotland, and concluded that the two nations share the same “kindly, friendly spirit”. It is not entirely possible to forget which country his establishment is in, but there is a peculiar dislocation that comes of half-watching a Celtic FC match on telly, while drinking a nine-year-old single cask Caol Ila in a public space decorated with saltires and stag antlers.
A computer programmer named Yoshi helps bring me back to reality, having just spent 5,000 yen (£40 and rising) on a single dram of 40-year-old Highland Park. Yoshi comes to the Helmsdale twice a week, but only once a month, on payday, does he ask Masaki for a special recommendation, no expense spared.
Tonight is that night. “I can’t fight the attraction,” he said. “White Bowmore, Black Bowmore… I try but I always lose.” Might this worldwide recession not persuade him to budget? “It’s getting more difficult for me,” he admitted. “But still not impossible.”
Over at Campbelltoun Loch, a tiny basement bar which seats no more than nine people at a time, another customer tells me in excellent English that he “cannot finish a day without a Scotch malt”. Tsuyoshi Komori keeps 500 bottles at home for that purpose.
Judging by his business card, Tsuyoshi is some kind of financier. “But if you have 500 bottles, it means you don’t have much to deposit in the bank,” he said. “I translate my money into memories instead.” I ask if his wife shares his passion. “No. But she understands.” And how does he decide which of his many malts to drink each night? “Instinct.”
Tsuyoshi and his friends represent the avant-garde of the Tokyo whisky scene. They are “wataku” – geeks, or purists if you prefer – who always order it neat, never “mizuwari” (mixed with water). They are also nomadic, explains David, and Campbelltoun Loch is currently their favourite precisely because the owner, Nakamura-San, does not have enough room for anything superfluous, generic, or sub-standard.
I can see why they trust him. Enquiring into my tastes, Nakamura chooses for me. If he hadn’t, I might never have heard of the 30-year-old from the long-defunct Port Ellen distillery, or realised how badly my life has been lacking it.
Just for the sake of contrast, Yoichi insists that I take a shot of “denki bran” when we make a brief stop at Manpuku Shokudo, a noisy izakaya restaurant under the Ginza railway tracks. Neither he nor David are sure what it’s made of – could be grape, or grain, or both – only that it dates back to the post-war period, when little else was available to citizens of the ruined city. Modern Tokyoites must still drink it so as not to forget, because even now it tastes like utter despair to me.
At the other end of the scale, in a dark and beautiful cocktail bar called Ginza-S, we order our last round of the night. Mixed with fresh fruit and Lochranza by an expert known as CJ (his real name is Seiji, but the Arran islanders couldn’t pronounce it when he too worked in the whisky trade there), they might be the best cocktails I will ever have, and they’re certainly the most expensive. The bill for three comes to more than £150. Knowing that I can’t afford another, but in no hurry to head back out into the rain, I find myself wishing for an earthquake.
This is probably not good karma while sitting underneath a tall building in such a seismically-unstable city, but I’m thinking of a mild one, not powerful enough to hurt anybody, or even break a single one of the bottles down here. Just strong enough to block exits, seal us in for a while, suspend all financial transactions, and let us sustain ourselves with some elegance. We could say we’d been saved by the water of life.
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