One of the many discoveries I made on my first night in Japan nearly 30 years ago were the vending machines that sold beer. As I walked to my new apartment just hours after landing in Tokyo, I found a machine stocked with different sizes of cans and brands. It was a eureka moment.

Then I saw something more bewildering: a small bottle of whiskey. I was impressed that it was sold in a vending machine but skeptical that it was any good. In a fit of caution, I opted for a few beers.

Over the next dozen years that I lived in Tokyo, when I saw Japanese whiskey, it was almost always in pubs where businessmen diluted it with water or ice to make it easier to drink. Back then, domestic whiskey was considered inferior to the Scottish original. One Japanese friend was so smitten with the Glenlivet I gave him he kept the bottle long after he emptied it.

It was only after moving back to the United States in 2004 that I realized that I had missed the emergence of Japan’s whiskey boom. My first hint should have been the 2003 movie “Lost in Translation,” in which Bill Murray cradles a glass of Suntory while filming a commercial.