IT will be broadcast over six months:

a huge 150-episode extravaganza on Japanese television about a Scot who made her life in the Land of the Rising Sun.

Yet Tokyo TV moguls are in a race against time to find an actress with the skillset to play the early 20th-century mother of Japanese whisky, Rita Cowan.

Casting directors need to find a beautiful European-looking star who can speak both English and Japanese flawlessly.

Their job is proving tough, not least because Cowan, who was originally from Kirkintilloch, East Dunbartonshire, is also known by her Japanese name, Taketsuru.

She spoke the distinctive Osaka dialect of Japanese and had a brilliant singing voice.

Ryoichiro Toji, a spokesman for NHK TV, said: "We are still considering about an actress to play Rita. We may announce her next month."

The TV company began its search last year, creating great excitement among the tiny acting community that knows both Japanese and English.

The station has never before decided to cast a Caucasian woman in a leading role in one of its mini-series.

Some Japanese news stories are suggesting it will be almost impossible to find an actress who can fit the bill: NHK, they say, may have to cast somebody who is part Japanese, part European.

The show, to be entitled Massan, will run every day at breakfast from September to March and is expected to attract tens of millions of viewers.

Despite being relatively unknown in her native Scotland, Jessica Robert "Rita" Cowan, became a legend in her adopted Japan and married. Her story - and that of her husband Masataka Taketsuru - has been kept alive long after their deaths.

The couple met in 1918 when Mr Taketsuru attended Glasgow University to study chemistry and learn the art of distilling whisky, then unknown in Japan. Ms Cowan's mother, newly widowed and facing demands for cash from bailiffs, took him in as a lodger. Ms Cowan had lost her first sweetheart in the war and her relationship with the visiting Mr Taketsuru scandalised middle-class Clydeside.

The pair married despite opposition from both families in 1920 and arrived in Japan in 1921, in the midst of a recession.

The mini-series, shown in 15-minute episodes, is the rollercoaster story of how the couple achieved their dream of making whisky - the Japanese variety is spelled like the Irish drink though Mr Taketsuru adopted the Scottish spelling - on the cold northern island of Hokkaido.

When it first announced plans for Massan - the title comes from Ms Cowan's nickname for her husband - NHK said the show would "vividly portray the fundamental strengths of Japanese people who have managed to get through tough times."

It added that the programme would also have "a lot of laughter and tears as it weaves together the story of an odd couple - a Japanese man who is a socially clumsy dreamer and his British wife who is brimming with elegance and speaks the dialect of Osaka".

The couple's business really took off during the war when Japan stopped importing Scotch, once a staple for its navy. Instead they bought from Mr Taketsuru's Nikka distillery, despite Ms Cowan being wrongly suspected of guiding allied submarines with a hidden radio. Children pelted her home with stones.

Mr Toji said NHK had still to decide whether to shoot any scenes in Scotland.

Ms Cowan's Scottish family have long argued that her remarkable life story - she died in 1961, leaving her husband so distraught he wanted to keep her bones by his bed - would make a great film.