“WE DO NOT SIMPLY create a whisky – we compose it, like a kimono, like a poem, like a season slowly unfolding”. Thus speaks Hibiki’s newly announced Global Brand Ambassador, Anna Sawai, in the whisky’s first ever global campaign, “The Masterpiece of Japanese Artistry”.

The lines delivered by Sawai neatly summarise what makes Hibiki such an exceptional whisky, nodding to the time, the consideration and the exacting precision that goes into every bottle. Crafted by the founders of Japanese whisky, the House of Suntory, Hibiki is a blend from their Yamazaki, Hakushu and Chita distilleries, and one that expertly encapsulates the Japanese concept of “wa”, or harmony.

The history of the House of Suntory threads back to 1923, when Shinjiro Torii’s created Japan’s first malt whisky distillery in Yamazaki; his son, Keizo Saji, continued the lineage, establishing the Hakushu and Chita Distillery. To this day, all House of Suntory creations remain 100 per cent distilled, matured and bottled in Japan.

An artist performing at the highest echelons of her craft, Sawai made history in 2024 when she became the first Japanese actress to win a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress thanks to her performance in Shōgun, for which she likewise received two Screen Actors Guild Awards and a Golden Globe Award. In 2028, she is set to play Yoko Ono in Sam Mendes’ hotly anticipated biopic, The Beatles – A Four-Film Cinematic Event.

The campaign centres around a short film in which Sawai appears in a striking kimono from Chiso Kimono House. Japan’s oldest family-run kimono house, Chiso Kimono House was founded in 1555 in Kyoto and is renowned for its traditional yuzen hand-dyeing techniques which Sawai’s kimono, adorned with motifs drawn from the Japanese landscape, showcases.

A butterfly, echoed in the kimono, flutters past a bottle of Hibiki as well as a hand delicately painting an intricate landscape, before drifting past Sawai. Its purple hue (kokimurasaki in Japanese and one of the country’s most revered colours) is mirrored in the neck of the Hibiki bottle.

The campaign also comprises two behind-the-scenes features, that draw parallels between the complex arts of kimono and whisky making. In one, Sawai visits the Kyoto studio of Eriko Horiki, a celebrated washi paper artist, who, since 1989 has made by hand the washi labels that appear on every Hibiki bottle. The second sees Sawai head to Chiso Kimono House’s atelier in Kyoto, where she encounters the exquisite kimono she wears throughout the campaign.

The collaboration between Hibiki whisky and Chiso Kimono House feels like a seamless fit: the marriage of two Japanese artforms and quintessentially Japanese producers, both with deep historical roots; both united by a shared obsession, honed over time, with perfection and craft.

“Becoming Hibiki’s first Global Ambassador feels natural because we share the same reverence for Japanese artistry and the beauty found in patience, balance and detail,” reflects Sawai.

“Hibiki represents a quiet kind of mastery, something refined over time with care and intention. As an actor, I’m drawn to that same philosophy of craft, where every choice is deliberate and every moment matters. To represent a brand that embodies the harmony between nature, time and human artistry is incredibly meaningful to me.”

Discover more about Hibiki here.

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