The best way to learn Japanese is to begin with the most important words in Japanese, and obviously the best Japanese phrases can all be found on a Japanese whisky label. So to learn the most commonly used Japanese words we picked out a few labels we had questions about and asked our Japanese translator to talk us through them.
First, we need to cover a couple of basics to navigate the terminology. There are three ways of writing in Japanese, kanji are pictoral characters which are shared with the Chinese language, hiragana are phonetic characters used in Japanese words, while katakana are phonetic characters that tend to be used in more recent imported words. Examples of each of these Japanese characters can be found on Japanese whisky labels.
We asked our friends at Japan House London to help us break the code using 13 examples of the most commonly found characters on Japanese whisky labels:
Source: Max Allen