No whisky drinkers should be surprised by the ever-growing popularity of Japanese whisky. Bartenders have been raving about it for years and it’s stocked at the most exclusive night jars, but it’s still a whisky for the purists: made, distilled, and mashed in the tradition of Scottish whisky for the best part of a century.

That’s because Japanese chemist Masataka Taketsuru studied whisky production in Scotland in 1918 and took his Scots-learnt skills back to drinks company Suntory to set up their Yamazaki distillery. He later founded Japan’s other big-name whisky producer, Nikka.

While homegrown whisky was popular in Japan during the latter part of the 20th century – the highball, whisky and soda, was introduced to younger and female drinkers in Japan and has been popular ever since – it was only exported in the early 2000s. It soon won awards and grew in popularity around the world. And its boom in popularity caught traditional distilleries by surprise.

“Some of the whiskies from Suntory and Nikka won so many awards that they ran out,” says Dom Roskrow, editor of Whisky Quarterly and author of Whisky Japan. “It’s a simple case that they laid down these whiskies but they didn’t lay down enough to meet increased demands. It started to become slightly exotic and mysterious.”

Yamazaki – the signature whisky from Suntory aged 18 years or over – is now virtually unfindable. Suntory’s Hakushu 12-year-old – the whisky drank by and made globally famous by Bill Murray in Lost in Translation – has ceased sales altogether. Nikka was forced to stop selling aged whiskies because they were running out of the stuff and would have gone bankrupt. Instead, the company put two non-age statement whiskies into the market. And whiskies from the now-defunct Karuizawa distillery can fetch over £25,000 per bottle on the secondary market.