Written by Mika Tanimoto, Owner-Bartender, Bar Little Happiness — Hiroshima’s specialist whisky & rum bar with 1,000+ bottles
There are moments in whisky that arrive without warning and rearrange something inside you. For me, one of those moments happened at a whisky trade event, when I lifted a glass of new make spirit from a distillery I had barely heard of and found myself completely unable to speak.
“What is this?” I thought. “What on earth is this?”
The distillery was Kameda, from Niigata. I had not been paying attention to it. I was wrong not to.
An Unlikely Beginning
Kameda Distillery sits in Niigata City’s Kameda industrial district — a working area of warehouses and factories, not the kind of picturesque countryside setting that whisky marketing tends to favour. Yet the whisky that comes from it has a purity and softness that seems to belong to somewhere entirely different.
The distillery’s founder, Tsunoda-shacho, has a background that could not be further from traditional whisky production. He worked for years as an MR — a medical representative at a pharmaceutical company — before his wife’s response to his complaints about Japanese whisky prices changed the course of his life.
He had been lamenting that his favourite whisky, Taketsuru 17 Year Old, had won international awards and become virtually impossible to find at reasonable prices. His wife, who now runs the family’s long-established stamp and seal business (Otani), listened to his frustration and said: “Well, just make your own then.”
This is the kind of statement that would stop most people. Tsunoda-shacho took it seriously.
The Inspiration: Yoichi Distillery
His love of whisky traced back to student days — visits to Nikka’s Yoichi Distillery in Hokkaido, where a friendly woman at the tasting counter would quietly pour him something special alongside the standard samples. The warmth of that place, the generosity of it, never left him.
Years later, facing a whisky world that seemed increasingly inaccessible, he decided he did not want to stand on the outside anymore.
What Makes Kameda’s Whisky Different
The moment I recovered my voice at that trade event, I started researching. What I found was a distillery built on the philosophy of hypothesis and verification — the same approach Tsunoda-shacho had used throughout his pharmaceutical career. Every decision at Kameda comes with a control group, a comparison, and a documented result.
The distillery uses Niigata-grown barley in its mashes — a decision made through direct negotiation with local farmers, paying above-market rates to encourage barley cultivation alongside Niigata’s famous rice agriculture. The malting is done in-house. The fermentation uses wooden washbacks. And the resulting new make spirit smells of mango, passionfruit, and concentrated tropical sweetness — not at all what you expect from a Japanese craft distillery in an industrial district.
That new make changed how I think about what Niigata can do.
Read the full Japanese column: little-happiness.jp/columns/kameda-distillery-visit-vol1/
Also see the complete Kameda series overview: little-happiness.jp/columns/kameda-distillery-report/
Bar Little Happiness | Hiroshima, Japan
Rum & Whisky specialists | 1,000+ bottles | English menu available
Open Mon–Sat 7PM–12:30AM, Sun 7PM–midnight
No cover charge. Walk-ins welcome.
english.little-happiness.jp