Banned in Its Homeland, This Cult Japanese Rum Is Near-Impossible to Find
At Travel Bar, one of the best places to drink spirits in all of New York City, when owner Mike Vacheresse says there’s something new you should try, wise drinkers listen and abide.
On a recent visit, the spirit in question was an unusual Japanese rum he’d just fallen for. Vacheresse pulled a box from the shelf and removed an oddly shaped, 1.8-liter shochu bottle with two colorful blue jays on the label.
This was Rurikakesu Rum.
Raising a Glencairn to my face, I found it funky and aromatic on the nose, a bit earthy with some minerality, and quite fruity on the palate — viscous and oily, despite only being 40 percent ABV. Truly incredible stuff.
The best part? It was banned in America, Vacheresse told me, and he was lucky to have this rare bottle. Later, I learned that wasn’t actually the case, but the reason you’ll most likely never see this rum in America is even stranger.
Nutrient-Rich
Rum has been produced in Japan since the early 20th century in subtropical locations like Ryukyu and Ogasawara islands. In fact, Japan is fertile ground for sugar cane production, much of it in Okinawa, where the crop first arrived via China in the 17th century.
North of Okinawa — which itself lies some 400 miles from mainland Japan — on the small archipelago that comprises the Amami Islands, an unusual sugar known as kokuto was developed by slowly cooking the sugar cane that was growing organically.
“It grew to be seen as a health food in Japan as it’s so nutrient-rich because they pull off so little molasses [in processing it],” says Stephen Lyman, an American who now lives in Fukuoka, Japan, from which he exports unique Japanese spirits to America via Honkaku Spirits. “It’s very dark, it’s rich, it’s grassy, it’s delicious.”
Most famously, however, the unrefined black sugar has been used for shochu production at small places like Takaoka Brewing. The company was founded in 1949 by Tokuhama Takaoka on Tokunoshima island. There, removed from so much of the rest of Japan, an unusual style of bull-fighting where bull faces bull not matador is also very popular. Initially Takaoka brewed sake, distilled shochu, and used shochu mashing techniques to also make pickles and miso.
“What makes it so interesting flavor-wise is it’s almost giving you an agricole expression. It’s not fresh cane juice, but you’re still getting a lot of the grassiness. Then, also, the treacle notes that you get from a lot of agricole.”
A few decades in, the company’s next president Hidenori Takaoka set his sights on rum. Though never previously distilled commercially in Japan, the spirit had a history in the nation.
“It was originally made privately in Ogasawara Islands and was consumed by the U.S. military,” claims Hideyuki Takaoka, the company’s current distiller and fifth or sixth generation of the family to hold the role. The Ogasawara Islands, slightly east of the Amami Islands, were controlled by the U.S. at the time.
In 1976, Hidenori Takaoka experimented with brewing using sugar cane juice as raw material. After years of trial and error, he established a brewing method using kokuto sugar fermented with natural yeast cultivated from papaya. Employing that technique to create the mash, by 1979 Takaoka had distilled and released a gold rum, produced from powdered kokuto sugar and aged in oak barrels. He called it Rurikakesu, and it soon became Takaoka’s top product, outselling even the company’s shochu.
Gasoline and Strawberries
A lot of rum is distilled from molasses, which is technically a waste product. Lyman does see a beauty to that, in that distillers are not wasting anything in the sugar production process. “But kokuto is a premium sugar source,” he says. “It’s very expensive rum because the production is so limited.”
Indeed, when a few rare bottles of Rurikakesu made it onto online Japanese spirits retailer dekantā a few years back, they sold for $140 before shipping. That’s more than the typical price of 21-Year-Old Appleton Estate. And in evidence of its current rarity, there’s only a single listing for Rurikakesu on global alcohol search engine wine-searcher.com at the time of this writing, at some liquor store in Oita, a mid-sized city on the Japanese island of Kyushu.
Lyman first tasted Rurikakesu after discovering it in Fukuoka, at a kaku-uchi, a liquor store where guests can purchase alcohol and then drink it in a standing corner. He recalls bringing the bottle home and the experience that followed.
“This is a super-tiny, family-run business on this outlying island. It’s not even on the main island in Amami [Amami Ōshima]. It’s another island. So they don’t have any desire to think like a lawyer about anything like this. When the government says no, for them it means no.”
“Gasoline and strawberries. That was my tasting note,” he says, before elaborating. “What makes it so interesting flavor-wise is it’s almost giving you an agricole expression. It’s not fresh cane juice, but you’re still getting a lot of the grassiness. Then, also, the treacle notes that you get from a lot of agricole.”
He immediately wanted to sell it in the small liquor store he owns in Fukuoka and perhaps try to talk the family into allowing him to export it to America. On the latter question, the family quickly said “no thanks” as they’d never worked with an exporter before, and certainly not a foreign one.
A year and a half after he’d first approached Takaoka Brewing, however, he got a DM on Instagram from an American guy who had just married into the Takaoka family. With this familial and English language connection, Honkaku Spirits set up an export deal within 48 hours and began work on exporting to the U.S. market. However, Lyman had only gotten a few bottles out to U.S. friends like Vacheresse at Travel Bar when all of a sudden the rum was banned.
The Ban
In April 2022, the tax office that regulates Japan’s liquor formulations announced its plans to protect the geographical indication of kokuto shochu by restricting its production to the Amami Islands, which currently count 26 distilleries.
This likewise meant the government would no longer allow any other aged spirits to be made from kokuto sugar. In other words, Rurikakesu — arguably the first rum of Japan — would be no more. (Nor would some of the select few other brands, like Amagi, which Honkaku Spirits has also exported to the U.S. ) “If it had any color to it whatsoever, you could no longer call it a rum,” Lyman says.
“They’re such a small company, if for some reason they got slapped by the tax office and lost their license or got fined, it could end the business.”
He sat down with the Takaoka family for a two-hour brainstorm, but convincing them of any solutions was a struggle. “This is a super-tiny, family-run business on this outlying island. It’s not even on the main island in Amami [Amami Ōshima]. It’s another island,” Lyman explains. “So they don’t have any desire to think like a lawyer about anything like this. When the government says no, for them it means no.”
Still, there were a few possible loopholes: Selling non-shochu, barrel-aged kokuto spirits (labeled as nothing more than “spirit”) was still legal, but only bottled at 27 percent ABV or less. As rum has to be at least 40 percent ABV in America, this was a clear no-go.
Technically, nothing in the new laws said that it was illegal to continue producing aged Rurikakesu solely for export. Unfortunately, the overly cautious Takoaka family wasn’t interested in that arrangement, either.
Nevertheless, Rurikakesu has continued distilling kokuto rum, though it’s now only bottled as a white rum, something that also remains legal in Japan. “It just doesn’t have the same profile,” Lyman laments. “It’s just that little bit of time in a cask that gives it such an interesting character. That’s the rum I love.”
Perhaps Lyman could import the white rum out of the country in totes and age it abroad?
Unfortunately, Rurikakesu was skittish about any arrangement that might run afoul of the government.
“They’re such a small company, if for some reason they got slapped by the tax office and lost their license or got fined, it could end the business,” Lyman says.
There is one final loophole, though: The law sunsets in 2027 and distillers can then start making aged kokuto sugar rum again.
In the meantime, Lyman will keep thinking of possible solutions, and eager Rurikakesu fans will be waiting.
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