Shinjiro Torii

So there are two giants of the Japanese whiskey industry.

You've got Shinjiro Torii, who's the financier, and you've got Masataka Taketsuru, who's the genius brewer.

Mm-hmm.

Masataka, this guy was born in 1894 into a family of sake brewers, so of course he was expected to go into that business.

So he started looking around for other people that were interested in making whiskey, and he ended up working for a company called Setsushozo.

This was kind of the biggest company he could find that was working on making whiskey.

And this is where he met that other important dude, Shinjiro Torii, who was the founder of Kotobukiya, a company that eventually would become Suntory, which you may recognize as one of the biggest whiskey producers in Japan these days.

But okay, so at the time, Masataka is working for Setsushozo, and the president of that company, in 1918, decided he wanted to send Masataka to the UK to learn how to make malt whiskey, and that's really, like, the big decision that was kind of ...

A 44-year-old man is pouring the first stone for a whiskey distillery, and almost everyone in the Japanese drinks industry thinks he's lost his mind.

That man being Shinjiro Torii, right? The founder of Suntory?

Exactly.

Shinjiro had already built a successful wine business.

That long-term thinking paid off decades later when international connoisseurs started discovering what the family had been making all along.

But here's the interesting part.

The Torii family didn't just hand the reins to the eldest son and hope for the best.

Kazuo had two sons, Nobutaka and Shingo.