We recently got the chance to sit down with this one at a tasting hosted by our importer, and honestly, we're still thinking about it.
Moto wasn't always a distiller. He built his whole career behind the bar first, and not just anywhere. Born and raised in Osaka, he worked his way through some of the most respected and botanically driven cocktail bars in Asia, including Bar Caol Ila in Shibuya, the legendary Bar Benfiddich in Shinjuku, WA SHU in Taipei, and a sister bar to Golden Promise over in Beijing. Anyone who knows the Tokyo bar scene will tell you Benfiddich alone is a serious pedigree, a bar built almost entirely around obscure spirits and house made ingredients. That background is all over what he does now.
Somewhere along the way he fell hard for amaro, and being a bartender who doesn't do anything halfway, he decided the only way to really understand it was to go see it made himself. So he set off across Italy, moving from distillery to distillery, sitting with old producers and picking apart their methods firsthand. That kind of hands on research is rare enough among distillers who grew up in the tradition, let alone someone starting from scratch on the other side of the world.
In 2020 he found a 100 year old farmhouse near Lake Sagami in Kanagawa, once an inn called Iseya, and that became the distillery. He moved his family up from Osaka and threw himself into farming the botanicals himself, building the space out, and testing formula after formula. A year later he released Scarlet the First, the first commercially made amaro out of Japan, and it sold out almost immediately.
What we love most is how he balances respect for tradition with a real willingness to push it somewhere new. Some of his bottlings are built as an homage to the classics. His Radice, for instance, is rooted in the original formula for Suze, but filtered through Japanese botanicals and his own palate rather than copied outright. It's not a tribute so much as a conversation with the source material.
Getting to try the whole range side by side at that importer tasting was honestly a bit of a privilege. Going bottle to bottle, you really see how wide he's willing to work, from more traditional red bitters to alpine style herbal liqueurs to things that don't map onto any category we already had a name for. There's real technical care in every one of them, and enough experimentation that you can tell no two bottlings are chasing the same idea twice.
Talking with him directly, there's still a bit of a language barrier here and there, but it honestly doesn't get in the way much. Whatever needs to be said comes through once the glass is poured.