Big in Japan

I look around for the obsessive middle-aged, menopausal men who make up most of the audience at any similar event in Europe, but in Japan the audience is… young

WHERE YOU come from?" asks my dining partner at a Shibuya noodle bar.  "Scotlando," I reply. "Ahhh!" He roars with laughter.  "Skirts!" I suddenly realise why all those girls had been tittering into their hands as I walked by, fully-kilted.

In Japan the only people who wear tartan and thick white knee-length socks are schoolgirls. Hey, I’d laugh at a Japanese bloke sauntering down the street dressed in a gymslip.  Still, it breaks the ice.

I was getting used to being taken for some hopelessly exotic alien creature, accepting that in every bar there would be someone pointing their phone at me taking a photo.  This can produce some interesting results.

At one point I was photographed with a man so small he barely reached my waist.  The photographer managed to frame the shot in such a way that it looked as if I‘d ripped his tiny friend’s head off and was carrying it under my arm like a football.

They seemed perfectly happy with this.  All part of a perfectly normal night crawling around Japanese bars. Actually, "normal" isn’t quite correct.  I see Japan as a parallel universe. 

It is a familiar place, but one where any sense of normality has been ever so slightly scrambled. It’s probably something to do with quantum physics.

I mean, where else can you be sitting in a Zen temple one moment, sipping green tea and carefully contemplating impermanence and the next being fed chips by a bunny girl? With chopsticks.  Maybe it isn’t quantum physics at all.

Perhaps it’s Zen. After all, there’s something very Zen about being shocked out of complacency and seeing things for what they really are.  Importers tell me that whisky is going through a tough time in Japan for a mass of reasons: recession, zombie economics, the cutting of import tax, parallel imports and unfashionability.

Why then, am I one among 20-odd Scotsmen dressed as schoolgirls talking and tasting at an annual whisky event, sold out for the third year running – just one of a number of equally heavily subscribed events surrounding the bash? If whisky was moribund then the hall would be empty, the bars would be dying.

The reverse seems to be the case. So what’s going on? I look around for anoraks.  Not the coat, but the obsessive fans, the middle-aged, menopausal, malt-loving men who make up most of the audience at any similar event in Europe.

There’s none to be seen in Tokyo, or Osaka or Kyoto.  Here the audience is young.  Late 20s and 30s.  They have post-modern haircuts.  Even more unbelievable, there are as many women as men.

These are the people drinking in the bars and taking photos with their phones.  Japanese distillers have leapt on this. Suntory and Nikka have started selling single cask malts, at different peating levels, aged in different woods.

Suntory has even tried lavender-flavoured whisky.  By doing so they’ve shown their own country the true complexities of its whiskies.  Japanese malt whisky has a delicate precision. It’s not onedimensional, rather it is laid out in front of you allowing you to dissect it, see how it holds together.  In some ways it’s like being a visitor.

Not understanding the internal tensions of a society is quite liberating as it gives you no other option but to give everything equal weight and consideration, thereby exposing the interconnectedness of things.

Now, that’s very, very Zen!  Not that any whisky firm has done this consciously.  As far as I can ascertain, the trendiness of malt among cool young drinkers in Japan has got little to do with marketing and more to do with the consumers and bartenders discovering it for themselves.

Distillers and importers are merely catching up.  This, I think, is A Good Thing.  Why? Because it tells producers that the consumer is a lot more savvy than they have perhaps thought them to be.

It suggests that niche marketing works, in fact it says that hands-off marketing is a more successful long-term strategy than major campaigns.  No one has marketed this whisky at Japanese women or young drinkers.

If they had done it would have been a disaster, the equivalent of a 40-year-old trying to breakdance in front of his kids. Johnnie Walker RTD anyone? This isn’t to say that the best approach in mature markets is to leave well alone and let the kids find it.

That laissez faire approach was what got "old" spirits into their current predicament. Rather, a subtle, discreet, streetwise approach might be a more beneficial and profitable way for any spirit to tackle a sluggish mature market that needs some serious rejuvenation.  That or transvestism.

David Broom is Glenfiddich Drinks writer of the year 2002 and a renowned spirits expert.