We stand outside 550 West 173rd Street in Washington Heights, one of the last neighborhoods before Manhattan turns into the Bronx.
The building is unassuming: a four-story structure with a concrete base and cream-colored bricks above. Small details, like an oval window on the top floor, set within an ornate sculptural frame, whisper of the influence of the Gilded Age. On the curb, a vendor sells mangoes and whole coconuts, and an open fire hydrant trickles water into the street on this steamy July day.
I’ve arrived here thanks to an invitation from Stephen Lyman, a spirits expert, writer, and researcher who is searching the city’s boroughs for lingering traces of an industrial chemist who nearly changed the face of American whiskey at the turn of the 20th century: Jokichi Takamine.
Lyman is an American expat who works as a medical researcher and professor in Fukuoka, Japan. He's a meticulous type: soft-spoken, with thick salt-and-pepper hair and glasses, and a trim build from daily early-morning runs, no matter the city or time zone. He has also built a career in the drinks realm exploring and celebrating Japanese spirits, shochu and awamori, and makes shochu himself, a painstaking task that requires patience over many seasons.
"Once I find something I want to learn about, I go deep," Lyman admits. "Jokichi Takamine represents my latest obsession."
After discovering Takamine while writing The Complete Guide to Japanese Drinks, Lyman felt captivated by the story of this industrious Japanese expat living in the U.S. in the late 1800s, whose medical research led to lifesaving innovations over the centuries that followed, but whose impact on the world of whiskey was cut short by an unfortunate twist of fate.
At first, Takamine felt like "an interesting aside" in the broader picture of Japanese whisky. But the more Lyman dug, the more he realized Takamine “is very likely the most important Japanese immigrant to the U.S. in American history,” he says. “His story deserved to be told."
The pull to learn more about Takamine’s lost legacy was so strong, Lyman is now in the process of writing a book about the man, and possibly others of his generation. The book doesn’t yet have a name or a publisher; it’s not a vanity project to sell whiskey (though it sure won’t hurt). For now, Lyman is simply following his curiosity, deep in research mode, visiting U.S. sites where Takamine once lived in an attempt to flesh out the edges of his character and legacy.
It hasn't been an easy project. Over the years, he's connected with Takamine's family, as well as executives at Daiichi Sankyo, an international pharmaceutical company that Takamine helped establish in Japan, which has a small museum in his honor in their Tokyo facility, as well as his archives. "All these various threads have made me intensely curious about him as a person," Lyman says.
I get the sense that Lyman doesn't really like talking about himself. Asked about what drives him in this project, he quickly deflects to enthuse about Takamine's remarkable life instead. ("He went from losing his status as a samurai as he enrolled in college to becoming the equivalent of a billionaire just 30 years later. Who does that?") He'll do this again and again—but his passion for his topic is evident.
"I'm not a historian," he admits. "I'm a drinks writer, a podcaster, a storyteller. I'm telling his story as best I can."
NYC is always quiet in the summertime, when so many residents flee the city heat for vacations or second homes; the extended work-from-homers are keeping commuter traffic low, too. But this July Thursday seems especially quiet—ideal conditions for tracing steps with minimal modern-day distractions.
“New York is always changing,” Lyman says quietly as he looks up at 550 West 173rd, sounding both wistful and matter-of-fact. That’s certainly true: New York City—and Manhattan in particular—seems to revel in ripping up sites and rebuilding them, often many times over. Businesses seem to disappear and reinvent overnight. People, too.
Earlier that day, Lyman and I met up at the Kitano Hotel in midtown, a Japanese-owned and -operated hotel (likely one of the few NYC hotels to advertise washlet-style toilets and green tea sets as guest amenities). As we began the trek uptown from there (Takamine spent most of his life above 100th Street), Lyman explained how Takamine came to live in New York.
Born in 1854 in Takaoka, Japan, he was the first of 13 children. His father was a samurai and physician; his mother’s family owned a saké brewery.
At 12, he won a scholarship to study western science at Dejima, a Dutch trading port in Nagasaki, where he learned to speak English (with a Dutch accent). That was followed by military training, then medical school in Osaka, where he studied engineering and applied chemistry. Eventually, he fully turned from medicine to chemistry, moving to Tokyo—where, in 1879 at the age of 25, he was among the first graduating class of Tokyo Engineering College (now Tokyo University).
The following year, he went abroad to Glasgow, Scotland, to continue his engineering studies and learn more about western industrial practices. “It’s possible that’s when he first discovered whisky,” Lyman posits, “but he left no memoir, so who knows?”
While he was still in school, big changes came to Japan: Specifically, in 1868, Japan’s feudal era came to an end. Takamine’s father lost samurai status—and his life suddenly changed. “In a generation it went from topknots and samurai swords to wearing western clothes and traveling the world," Lyman explains. "It was precisely at that moment he came of age.” And as a former son of a samurai, doors were open to him that wouldn’t have been for other Japanese emigrants, at a pivotal time when Japan was opening up to the rest of the world.
At the age of 28, Takamine went to work for the Japanese government at the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce. His efforts to blend Western knowledge with Japanese farming extended to modernizing indigo products, paper-making, and saké production. That led to him being sent to the U.S. as a delegate to the 1884 World Cotton Centennial Exposition in New Orleans, where he met his future wife, Caroline Hitch, an 18-year-old debutante, at a party.
Because Takamine spoke English and carried himself in a dignified way, “the press took him as royalty,” Lyman explains, noting that Takamine’s knowledge and temperament “made for easy entrée into polite society.”
When he returned to Japan, he was tapped to lead the Japanese Bureau of Patents and Trademarks; patenting many of his discoveries would become part of his business model (and legacy) throughout his life. Then, he took a leave to establish Asia's first superphosphate factory, which is where he made his fortune, enabling him to marry Caroline in 1887. His first client: a U.S. fertilizer company.
(An unhappy note: at this point in his life, Jokichi develops serious liver disease, which would plague him the rest of his life.)
Yet, Caroline wasn’t happy living in Japan, and three years after they married they moved back to the U.S.
Our first official stop on the unofficial Takamine tour of New York City starts at (almost) the very northernmost point of Central Park, so we hop into a car to cut the 90-minute walk down to 30 minutes. With bottles of whiskey rattling around in the trunk (more on that later), Lyman explains how Takamine almost changed the landscape of American whiskey as we know it today.
After moving back to the U.S., at first Takamine and Caroline lived in Chicago, where in 1890 he started the Takamine Ferment Company, an offshoot of the U.S. fertilizer connection he'd made while in Japan. Here, he patented the Takamine Process, which would eventually be used to create American corn whiskey using koji—a type of mold that is ubiquitous in both Japanese cuisine and beverages—as a fermentation catalyst, instead of traditional enzymes from malted barley as was common in Scotch-style whisky production.
Compared to the weeklong version of production needed to make malted barley, the koji process (also known as koji amylase) took less than two days. Further, the koji spirit contained fewer volatile compounds, meaning it required less or no cutting of heads or tails, yielding less waste (and more cost savings). The use of koji also added a subtle umami flavor, which some liken to a savory or mushroom-like tone.
"The year of his patent, 1894—that's the same year the founder of Nikka [whisky] was born," Lyman points out, referring to Masataka Taketsuru, who is widely considered the first Japanese whisky distiller. Could what we know today as Japanese whisky first have taken root in U.S. soil, instead of in Japan, and decades before Nikka first came into being? It certainly was on track to do so.
Takamine licensed the process to the Distillers’ & Cattle Feeders’ Trust in Peoria, Illinois—casually called the Whiskey Trust—a large-scale operation making about 80% of all spirits in the U.S. at the time. "It was bigger than MGP is now," Lyman notes, referring to Midwest Grain Product, the giant corporation in Indiana and Kansas that currently supplies whiskey to hundreds of distilleries nationwide.
In 1891, the Los Angeles Herald proclaimed under the headline "CHEAP SPIRITS" that the Takamine Process would "Revolutionize the Distilling Business." The Trust planned to use the process at every distillery it managed, making the spirits it produced 15-20% cheaper. Takamine’s creation would eventually do the same for "beer, ale, and other fermented liquors."
Commercial production of the koji whiskey began in 1894. Unfortunately, fate stepped in to prevent the style from becoming the national standard. Antitrust legislation broke up the Whiskey Trust in February 1895, and the distillery was shuttered. In the end, only a small amount of Takamine-influenced whiskey was ever produced.
“We have no idea what happened to the liquid in those barrels made during those three months," Lyman says. "Probably it was blended into other products, and sold to the public without any recognition of what was in the bottle. Which is unfortunate, because except for this trustbusting, and the timing of what happened, this could have been an established style of American whiskey well over 100 years ago.””
Takamine launched an unsuccessful lawsuit against the Whiskey Trust for breach of contract. Possibly exhausted by the battle, Takamine faced another bout with liver disease. While he recovered, he returned his attention to koji amylase, this time using it to create Taka-Diastase, a microbial plant enzyme that aided digestion. Sold in powder form, it was a forerunner to Alka-Seltzer® or TUMS®, and made him prosperous.
Eventually, he moved his family to New York, where his legacy would extend beyond failed attempts at whiskey making and flourish in spaces both social and professional.
Takamine first landed in NYC in 1897, but the earliest known record of where he lived is for 1902, at 475 Central Park West. The location makes sense. It would have been an easy walk to his lab, then located at West 103rd St., where he continued to work on Taka-Diastase and eventually founded Sankyo, a Japan-based company to import the koji-based digestive aid, a nice boomerang. (That company is now pharmaceutical giant Daiichi-Sankyo.)
In 1900, he had what is undoubtedly his most important medical discovery in that Harlem lab: He isolated adrenalin–"a landmark moment," Lyman says. Now called epinephrine, it's used to treat allergic reactions, cardiac arrest, and myriad other conditions. "He licensed that adrenalin to Parke-Davis," now part of Pfizer, Lyman notes. "It made him the most successful Japanese businessman outside of Japan."
Standing in front of 475 Central Park West, it quickly becomes clear that the original building no longer exists; what’s here now is newer, with Art Deco stylings such as a whitewashed porch with symmetrical rows of porthole-like circles. A listing on StreetEasy dates the current stone building to 1913.
Lyman asks the super for insight about the building, hoping to glean more information about its origins. Wiping his hands on a stained yellow T-shirt, the super replies: “Why don’t you Google it?”
The walk continues.
By Nov. 25, 1904, Takamine’s home was at 45 Hamilton Terrace, in Harlem’s Hamilton Heights. The address, on a lovely, tree-lined street leading down to St. Nicholas Park at the end of the block, brings us to one of a row of five identical stone-brick townhouses … built in 1910. Another dead end.
My mind wanders. It’s not lost on me that Lyman, an American native living in Japan, is spending time researching Takamine, a Japanese native who lived much of his life in America. Why devote so much time to a figure who remains obscure to most of the Western mainstream?
In part, it's because he shouldn't be so obscure. It was a revelation that Taketsuru wasn’t the first Japanese man to make whiskey. And Lyman wasn’t alone in the fascination that stemmed from that discovery. Early in the research process, he connected with Michiaki Shinozaki, of Shinozaki Brewery & Distillery in Fukuoka, Japan. In conversation, Lyman found that Shinozaki shared his fascination with Takamine, which affirmed his quest to learn more. "I realized there may be more to the Takamine story than met the eye,” Lyman says. “Even in Japan he was largely a forgotten figure."
(Of note: Shinozaki is now contract distilling a revival Takamine whiskey brand for Lyman’s importing business Honkaku Spirits. The line includes an 8-year-old bottling released in 2021, and a 16-year-old redolent of toffee, dark fruit and oak, which is anticipated to join the lineup later this year, or in early 2024.)
Lyman’s interest probably also stems from the parallels one can draw between his own life and Takamine’s. He's fascinated by the era in which Jokichi, a fellow scientist, came of age—when the fall of the shogun, along with the rise of industrialization and the advent of the telephone and electricity made the world open and new. "It's a singular moment in Japanese history," he points out—one that parallels the way the rise of the Internet and mobile phone culture has revolutionized the current generation and the way we move around the world.
We approach 521 West 179th Street. The site of Takamine’s office, circa 1908, is now the Iglesia Pentecostal de Washington Heights Jesús Es Rey, a mustard yellow brick building with red rust trim, and a footprint spanning half the block. The church has been in this location since 1968; a trim building with Beaux Arts detailing across the street on Audubon looks about the right age.
Lyman is sanguine: Even if the original construction still existed, “this is the least important of the buildings.” By this point in his life, Takamine's greatest scientific discoveries were already behind him; he was more focused on philanthropic efforts.
“For a biographer, there’s nothing quite like standing where a subject once stood to try to channel their viewpoint—both actual and emotional. ”
I wonder if the entire day will end up like this. Almost from the get-go, our quest to see the places where Takamine lived hasn't panned out. Google, StreetEasy, the GPS in the car—none of this technology helped actually triangulate any evidence of a person who lived and worked here a century ago. In fact, it feels like it shattered any illusion of human connection.
How do you track someone who hasn't left much of a personal record behind?
While he was a prolific scientist and entrepreneur, Takamine wasn't much of a diarist. Because his work was vital to so many industries, you can find a wide array of sanitized, possibly revisionist biographies online, even snippets of his life told via manga. He's been the subject of doctoral dissertations, too, which has provided some key details for Lyman's work.
But these documents don't tell you much about what a person saw, or felt. For a biographer, there's nothing quite like standing where a subject once stood to try to channel their viewpoint—both actual and emotional.
Then, as the day is beginning to feel all too “Waiting for Godot” (spoiler alert: Godot never shows), we catch our first glimmer of Takamine.
When it was first dedicated in 1897, Grant's Tomb was regarded as a spectacular, if solemn, edifice. Early photos show it perched on a bluff above the Hudson River—its domed cupola topped with a pyramid, six massive columns at the entrance flanked by statues of eagles on either side—the sole commanding fixture for miles around. The architect, John H. Duncan, described it as "a monumental Tomb, no matter from what point of view it may be seen."
Today, with larger buildings rising to the east and the south in Morningside Heights, it doesn't seem so spectacularly massive to modern-day eyes. Yet, it retains some grandeur, if only because it's surrounded by a large swath of parkland. Up close, it's still an imposing structure, appropriately so as the final resting place for U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant and his wife.
“These trees—transplanted from the island of Japan to the island of Manhattan—symbolize how deeply the threads of America and Japan intertwined in Takamine’s personal and professional lives. ”
Lyman queries the uniformed guard sitting inside the historical landmark. He has no new info about Takamine but confirms that he’s the one who donated the cluster of cherry trees around the side and behind the tomb. We go around back to walk among the trees; it's too late in the season for delicate pink cherry blossoms, but we spy a few branches laden with clusters of rosy fruit. Things are looking up.
“He donated 2,100 trees between New York, Washington, D.C., and Baltimore,” Lyman says. “He did not put his name on the donation.” Rather, he funded a gift of cherry trees from the mayor of Tokyo, intended as a symbol of Japanese-American friendship.
It's a touching gesture—and strikes me as surprisingly understated. After all, few Americans would pass on the opportunity to trumpet their philanthropy. But this quiet consideration is in keeping with what drew Lyman to Japan and its culture, he reflects later. "It's very civilized."
These trees—transplanted from the island of Japan to the island of Manhattan—symbolize how deeply the threads of America and Japan intertwined in Takamine's personal and professional lives. He raised a Japanese-American family during an era when it wasn't commonplace; he created a process for Japanese-style whiskey in America that could have changed the landscape of the spirit in both countries; eventually, he would build a social club for Japanese businessmen in America.
These trees outlasted his lifetime, but not his legacy.
I listen to the wind ruffling the leaves overhead, a small respite as the hot, humid day turns the corner on afternoon. I ask Lyman, would Honkaku Spirits ever do a sakura (cherry-tree wood) cask-finished whiskey, as many others have done recently? It’s possible, he replies.
Finally—a residence that’s still here. A triumph!
334 Riverside Drive is a beaut, too, one of a row of stately townhouses between 105th and 106th, with views of Riverside Park. As I drool over the wrought-iron railings and columns flanking the graceful arched entryway, Lyman quips: “If Honkaku ever becomes a million-dollar business, we’ll buy that building and make it our headquarters.”
The entire block is now landmarked as a historic district, according to a posted plaque: “Built between 1899 and 1902, these townhouses are uniformly and elegantly in the French Beaux-Arts style, popular in that period but usually reserved in the United States for large public buildings.” A notable resident of 441 Riverside Drive was 1930s movie actress Marion Davies, a longtime friend of publisher William Randolph Hearst, the plaque informs. There’s no mention of Takamine.
But as we know, this is an important place in Takamine’s legacy: the first location of The Nippon Club, the only Japanese social club in the U.S., which opened in 1905.
Though Takamine, age 50 at the time, was already tremendously wealthy, unfortunately, a man of Japanese descent—even the “son of a samurai”—wouldn’t have been welcome at NYC’s often-segregated private clubs, where business relationships were forged. So, he started his own, naming it for the Japanese word for Japan (Nihon or Nippon).
In the year it opened, an article in The New York Sun called the club “flourishing,” citing 90 active members. “The Nippon Club, which is designed to represent in the best way the Japanese in New York, has thus far been so successful that its future prosperity seems to be assured, and its members hope and believe that it will come to be as permanent as it is unique among the social institutions of this cosmopolitan metropolis,” the article continues.
When the club moved downtown to West 85th Street, leaving the beautiful townhouse vacant, Takamine and his family moved in, in 1909. "It gives a sense of the wealth he had accumulated, that he could live in a six-story Manhattan townhouse with his family,” Lyman observes. “It’s difficult for anyone in any era. But for this son of a samurai, one of 13 children from essentially rural central Japan, to end up here is really a remarkable journey.”
In 1912, The Nippon Club moved again, this time into a Renaissance Revival building custom-designed for the organization at 161 West 93rd Street. It stayed there until 1940. “After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the building was seized by the federal government,” Lyman notes. “They never got it back.”
I’m struck by how the present and past keep colliding on this walk. In the age of Stop AAPI Hate, it’s jarring to realize this was the work of World War II-related anti-Asian sentiment, against a private club that existed because of anti-Asian sentiment. I feel a heaviness, wondering if that cycle will ever be broken.
As I linger in that space, Lyman finds the buzzer. A caretaker appears, trailed by a small boy with dark, curly hair, and lets us into the building—a second victory for the day. The church has been here for about 60 years, the caretaker says. While much of the interior has been modernized, some original touches remain: a beautiful old wooden staircase with rounded copper lantern finials that resemble copper-pot stills, ornate ceilings with rounded fixtures meant to hold chandeliers, terra-cotta tiled floors with subtle decorative accents in blue-and-copper glaze, which Lyman examines closely.
The possibility of walking the same tiled floors and ascending the same creaky stairs that Takamine once did renews Lyman's optimism. Squint, and you might imagine the ghostly outline of a shadow. "There's some permanence to the architecture," he muses, particularly the bigger structures. "Of course, the dilapidated 100-, 200-year-old tenements are torn down. If it's not useful, tear it down."
In the 50s, The Nippon Club moved downtown yet again, to West 72nd Street, and later, to its current home at 145 West 57th St. With Takenaka Corporation of Tokyo, the club subsequently built a 21-story granite and glass skyscraper at the same address. Allocated seven floors within the building, "the new club will have a restaurant and tea room, banquet facilities, a ballroom, classrooms, and exhibition gallery," according to an 1989 story in the real-estate section of The New York Times. In 1991, the club moved into the building, where it remains today. The building was christened as Nippon Club Tower.
After a day seeing how few buildings that once saw Takamine's legacy remained, it's a reminder that sometimes the physical structure isn't what matters, but the driving spirit within. Despite the caprices of time and New York City real-estate developers, Takamine created a safe haven for Japanese expats over a century ago—and it remains today.
As it turns out, not even New York can tear down everything—at least, not all at once.
Which brings us back to where we began this story, at that point still in the morning light: 550 West 173rd Street.
For sure, Takamine would barely recognize Washington Heights—perhaps best-known today as the setting for Lin-Manuel Miranda's play and film "In The Heights," which celebrates the Dominican Republic roots of many who now call the neighborhood home. But from 1913 to 1919, this was the site of Takamine’s lab, where he focused on Taka-Diastase.
Just a couple of years later, in 1921, he sold the building and moved with his wife to New Jersey. He would stay there for about a year. On July 22, 1922, he died in Manhattan’s Lenox Hill Hospital from kidney disease, likely related to complications from his lifetime battle with liver issues. His memorial was held at The Nippon Club, and he was (and still is) interred at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.
“New York is always changing,” Lyman says, finding no evidence of Takamine, just the mango and coconut vendor sitting in the shade of a tree. "It looks old enough," he murmurs, hunching down in hopes of finding a stone carved with the date the building was constructed; no luck.
I express a theory to Lyman: Youthful America prefers to look forward, not back—but Japan views itself over long-lived dynasties. He disagrees.
“In Japan, it’s the concept of the structure that matters,” he says. Despite constant real estate development, a pagoda might be rebuilt eight or nine times on the same site, but it will still be a pagoda, not condos. “You have enormous preservation of tradition,” if not the original buildings. By comparison, “the U.S. is such a young country, it’s easy for us to abandon whatever our local traditions were.”
In this moment of reflection, I realize how Lyman seems to deftly straddle the line between both cultures he calls home: a comfortable gray area for this American expat living in Japan. Many of the buildings we looked for today no longer exist, but their stories live on through people like him.
“I express a theory to Lyman: Youthful America prefers to look forward, not back—but Japan views itself over long-lived dynasties. ”
After attempting to retrace Takamine's steps, "I found there's a small group of people in the Western world who cared very much about this man and his legacy and understanding it," Lyman says. "It has encouraged me to try to tell the story and get the word out about him, and honor his legacy. I now feel a responsibility to help revive his reputation. I don't know why I feel that's my responsibility, but that's how it is."
The last stop of the day is in Brooklyn, at Travel Bar, a whiskey-centric spot in Carroll Gardens. Elsewhere in the borough, about a dozen distilleries are making whiskey; how many of them know about the pioneer who once lived across the East River?
Lyman’s business partner Christopher Pellegrini joins him at the bar, where they pour the 16-year-old Takamine for a thirsty group. The next day, some of the same folks milling around will join Lyman for a toast in Woodlawn, alongside Takamine’s grave, to commemorate the 101st anniversary of his death.
It took a century, but whiskey always finds a way to bring people together.
Words by Kara NewmanIllustrations by Colette Holston
