Nikka's founder Masataka Taketsuru is considered the father of Japanese whisky. After completing studies in chemistry, he was recruited by the Settsu Shuzo company, who sent him to Scotland in 1918 to complete his apprenticeship. There he developed a passion for whisky and decided to dedicate his life to it. In 1934, he built Yoichi, his first distillery, on the island of Hokkaido. Its growing success enabled him to establish a second distillery in 1969, near Sendai, named Miyagikyo. It is from the single malts of these two distilleries that the Nikka Whisky group produces its entire range of Japanese whiskies.

Named after Nikka’’s founder Masataka Taketsuru, the Taketsuru range is composed of blended malts—or Pure Malts, as Nikka calls them—produced at the group’’s two Japanese distilleries Yoichi and Miyagikyo. In 2020, Nikka announced that it would no longer be releasing bottlings with age statements in the Taketsuru range, switching instead to bottlings with no age statement, a move it had already made with its Yoichi and Miyagikyo single malts in 2015.