HE was the Japanese chemist who came to Scotland with a thirst for knowledge and left with the secrets of how to make the finest Scotch whisky.

And now the life of Masataka Taketsuru is to be celebrated at the university where he first enrolled to learn the art of his trade a century ago.

The University of Glasgow’s Adam Smith Business School is to host an evening reception and exhibition in honour of the achievements of the man credited with introducing the water of life to the Land of the Rising Sun.

Today, Japanese whisky is a multi-billion-dollar industry with the Suntory distillery’s Hibiki 21-year-old blend a regular recipient of the World’s Best Blended Whisky title at the World Whisky Awards.

So big has it grown that the Far Eastern varieties now rival those in whisky’s native land, and it was all made possible by Taketsuru’s passion for spirits.

Masataka Taketsuru was born to a highly traditional sake-brewing family from Takehara, a coastal town 50 miles east of Hiroshima, in 1894.

It is said that as a boy he was involved in a scuffle during which he suffered a particularly violent blow to his nose, which left the young Masataka exceptionally sensitive to smell, a talent he later used to identify dozens of different whisky brands by their aroma.

Although he was expected to take his place in the family firm he joined another company, Settsu Shozo, after graduating with a degree in fermentation, and from there developed his plan to bring whisky to the Japanese market, which until then had shown little interest in the drink.

Arriving during the winter of 1918 aged just 25, he was taken in by the Cowan family of Kirkintilloch as a lodger and enrolled in the university’s summer chemistry programme while also studying at the Mitchell Library in his spare time, translating Nettleton’s seminal tome, The Manufacture of Spirits in the Distilleries of the United Kingdom, into Japanese.

In the spring of 1919, he gained his first hands-on experience of whisky-making with a five-day apprenticeship at the Longmorn distillery in Speyside and later at Bo’ness with the master distiller James Calder.

But whisky was not the only thing Masataka would come to love about Scotland. A friendship with his landlady’s daughter Rita had blossomed into something more romantic and the pair were married in 1920, despite the staunch disapproval of both their families.

Rita Cowan, at 23, was living a life of faded prosperity with her mother and three siblings after the death of her father, Dr Samuel Campbell Cowan, the previous year, and seized the chance to break away from her tight-knit community even though it would mean uprooting herself to the other side of the world.

Masataka had already marked himself out as an unusual man, but his mixed marriage was highly unorthodox in his home country, where arranged marriages were seen as the essential ingredient of a happy and successful life and Westerners were few and far between.

According to family legend, the couple slipped away and married in a register office without the knowledge or permission of either of their sets of parents. Rita’s 16-year-old sister and her friend acted as witnesses and the diminutive party ate an illicit celebratory meal afterwards at the nearby Station Hotel.

But despite its clandestine start, the marriage would prove to be a success, with Rita accepting the customs of Japan when she emigrated there with her husband later that year.

The couple later adopted two children – a daughter, Rima, whose name combined Rita and Masataka – and a son, Takeshi, who was Taketsuru’s orphaned nephew. Takeshi, who would go on to inherit Masataka’s whisky business, witnessed the atomic blast at Hiroshima from his home nearby.

Back in Japan, Masataka put his new-found distilling skills to use with a job at Suntory, led by Shinjiro Torii, which was planning to become the first whisky maker in Japan.

However, whisky was slow to catch on in the Japanese market and it wasn’t until 1935 that the breakthrough was made.

Establishing a distillery at Yoichi on the island of Hokkaido, which has a similar climate to Scotland, Mastaka began to produce a drink that found a ready market. After working at Suntory for over 10 years, Masataka left the company in 1934 and established his own company, Nikka, and built the distillery at Yoichi on the island of Hokkaido.

Rita died in 1961, and Mastaka in 1979, after a life which saw him awarded six honours from the Emperor and his hometown, and gain the unofficial title of “the father of Japanese whisky”. Kirkintilloch, where he met the love of his life, is now twinned with Yoichi, which has a “Rita Road” among its street plan.

Dr Niall Mackenzie of the University of Glasgow Adam Smith Business School said: “Masataka Taketsuru is one of the university’s many illustrious and world-changing alumni – the centenary of his enrolment at the University of Glasgow is an occasion for celebrating his role in the creation of Japan’s whisky industry and the longstanding connections between the university and Japan.”

The celebration of Masataka’s Taketsuru’s life will be held on November 7 at the University of Glasgow’s Kelvin Gallery.