Japan has adopted many Americas. There’s the America of its postwar Constitution and of military forces stationed throughout the country, of consumer culture and concrete highways. There’s the America of baseball, jazz and denim — all of which entered Japan in different ways and at different times. The sociologist Shunya Yoshimi once wrote that America, which occupied the country for seven years after 1945, was seen as both liberator and conqueror: “an object of desire and a source of fear.” These Americas are inseparable from one another.
The country is famous for perfecting inventions that originated elsewhere, a process that accelerated after 1868, when Emperor Meiji announced that “knowledge should be sought throughout the world to strengthen imperial rule.” This proclamation marked the formal end of the kaikin edicts, which forbade Japanese from going abroad. Now, as one official declared, “we must copy the foreigners where they are at their best.”
Yet Japan, Yoshimi writes in “The Ambivalent Consumer” (2006), “did not merely import American culture; it remade it.” Reinvention often flowed from reverence: The country’s craftspeople studied each object with great attention and made it Japanese. Each borrowing is transformed almost past recognition, in a culture that competes through innovation (or kaizen, the word for such relentless improvement). The world then often copies Japan in turn, from anime to bullet trains.
Convenience Stores
When it comes to American imports, perhaps nowhere is kaizen more apparent than in konbini (a shortened version of konbiniten, as the shops were originally known, a mash-up of the Japanese words for “convenience” and “store”), of which there are about 55,000 in Japan. In cities, there are often several at major intersections. Japan’s largest chain, 7-Eleven, originated in 1927 with a Texas ice maker; Lawson, its third largest, in 1939 with an Ohio dairy supplier. (The country’s other leading chain, FamilyMart, is homegrown.) But when the first convenience store opened in Japan in the ’60s, the concept quickly diverged from the American model: Konbini are defined by their freshness and variety, with produce that changes by season and region.
Shop at a konbini and you barely need to go anywhere else. In these compact shops, with their famously pristine bathrooms, you can mail a package, pay residence taxes and find an office shirt. At a Lawson in Tokyo’s Shibuya district last summer, beyond the usual wall of ramen offerings were lemon salt jerky, freeze-dried tempura onion rings, cod roe nori bites, brown butter financiers. Some konbini chains have even collaborated with Michelin-starred restaurants. Innovations extend beyond product lines: Lawson has placed animated avatars in some locations that now run without human staff.
“The definition of ‘convenience’ varies from age to age,” the founder of 7-Eleven Japan, Toshifumi Suzuki, said in 2023. “It is important to always imagine, every day of your life, how things will change.”
Ice
The first American ice plants date from just after the Civil War. The technology reached Japan in 1879, when an American-run plant opened in Yokohama, and Japanese ice soon differentiated itself. “Our ice is harder and more translucent,” says Minoru Kuriiwa, a bartender at Bar Sosu in Tokyo’s Ginza district. “It has no bubbles, no scratches. It melts slowly. And it chimes against the glass.” With a long metal spoon, he rotates a luminous sphere until it whirls. “You have to spin it to cool the glass and warm the ice. If you don’t, the ball cracks.”
One of Japan’s most successful ice companies is Kuramoto, founded in 1923 and based in the northwestern city of Kanazawa. It produces everything from jagged kachiwari cracked ice to prismatic ninja, which turns almost invisible as liquid is poured over it. Kuramoto also replicates the iconic sphere ice — that large ball of frozen water that came to Japan from the West in the late 19th century and forever changed cocktail culture.
Kuramoto makes sphere ice in different sizes, calibrated to tumbler shape and even by restaurant. Kazuhiko Kuramoto, the company’s fifth-generation head, says that while ice making was an American invention, “we’ve taken the technology in new directions. God is in the details.”
Whisky
In Toyama prefecture, the Wakatsuru Saburomaru distillery, which started as a sake brewery in 1862 and began making whisky in 1952, is also evolving through kaizen. Its current head, Takahiko Inagaki, shows me a machine he invented that renews used barrels by lightly scraping off the casks’ interiors. For the barrelheads, the company often uses locally grown mizunara (Japanese oak), a rare, porous wood that gives some of the best Japanese whiskies their unique notes of coconut, sandalwood and temple incense.
Though Japanese whisky has close ties to Scottish distilleries (and the Japanese spell their product without an “E,” like the Scots), the first whiskey arrived in Japan from the United States, on the so-called black ships that forced open the country’s ports to foreign vessels in the 1850s. The American delegation presented whiskey to the emperor, along with such gifts as a miniature steam engine. The first Japanese whisky distillery, Suntory’s Yamazaki, was founded in 1923 on land between Kyoto and Osaka; Nikka’s Yoichi a little over a decade later on Hokkaido. During the Allied occupation, Japanese distillers produced (mostly cheap and bad-quality) whiskies for the American army. But those years also laid the foundation for greatness: for transcendent Yamazaki malts of unrivaled complexity and richness.
Price hikes in 1983, followed by a liquor tax, sent the whisky industry into a 25-year free fall. Distilleries across Japan closed; by 2000, only seven were still operating. Stefan van Eycken, the author of “Whisky Rising: The Definitive Guide to the Finest Japanese Whiskies & Distilleries” (2017), says that when Ichiro Akuto set up the now-celebrated Chichibu distillery in 2004, “people thought he was out of his mind. It was like putting all your savings into making cassette tapes.”
Global perceptions changed after a Yoichi 10-year-old single cask from the Nikka distillery won the Best of the Best competition (now known as the World Whiskies Awards) in 2001: the first time a Japanese whisky took a top international prize. Suddenly everyone wanted to drink Japanese whisky and, as supply dwindled, prices rocketed. Last year, Sotheby’s auctioned off a 1960 bottle from another distillery for $374,000. Japan now has more than a hundred distilleries.
When Inagaki’s great-grandfather first distilled whisky in the 1950s, it was a blend called Sunshine. After Inagaki took over, he quit producing Sunshine and upgraded to single malts. I ask if anyone regretted that break with the past. Inagaki shakes his head. “What’s tradition?” he says. “A series of innovations. Nothing more.”
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