‘Shōgun’ Star Anna Sawai Is the First Global Ambassador for Japanese Whisky Maker Hibiki

3 min read

Anna Sawai has been on a remarkable run over the last few years. The actress became the first Japanese woman to win a Primetime Emmy Award for her lead role in Shōgun, taking home a Golden Globe and a Screen Actors Guild Award alongside it. Now she has taken on a new role as the global face for Hibiki Whisky. The House of Suntory, one of Japan’s most famous heritage brands dating back to 1899 and often credited with founding Japanese whisky as a category, has produced Hibiki since 1989. (Hibiki Whisky also famously appeared in Sofia Coppola’s 2003 film Lost in Translation, in which Bill Murray’s character is hired to appear in a series of advertisements for the brand.)

“Appointing a brand ambassador is a significant milestone for us,” Masaki Morimoto, president of House of Suntory, tells T&C. “We were looking for someone rooted in Japanese heritage yet shaped by a global career, which made Anna Sawai the perfect fit.”

Sawai is first appearing in a cinematic short film, titled The Masterpiece of Japanese Artistry. Shot entirely in Japan, the piece features not just whisky but also the centuries-old trades of making kimonos and washi paper. “The campaign explores the resonance between different forms of Japanese artistry, grounded in a shared philosophy—a deep connection between nature and people, with respect for time and intuition,” Morimoto says. “Anna instinctively understands this. It’s what makes her such a natural partner for Hibiki.”

Two behind-the-scenes videos, seen below and shared exclusively with Town & Country, offer a closer look at the craftspeople who shaped the creative direction for the project. One follows Sawai to the Kyoto studio of Eriko Horiki, a washi paper artist who has handmade the white labels adorning every Hibiki bottle since the product launched 37 years ago. The other takes viewers inside Chiso’s atelier, where the kimono worn in the movie was constructed with what Sawai describes in the vignettes as “extraordinary precision.”

Chiso, which has been producing custom kimonos more than 460 years, including for members of the Japanese royal family for generations, created a custom piece for the film using traditional yuzen dyeing techniques. Dating back to the 17th century, yuzen requires drawing the designs onto white fabric with a paste resist, made with flour from sticky and white rice, before dyeing the fabric.

The kimono was designed as a visual narrative in itself, incorporating natural motifs drawn from the landscapes that form Hibiki’s flavors. Sawai wears it throughout the film, which moves between images of silk, whisky barrels, and the shifting Japanese seasons. Additionally, the kimono used in the film is actually based on another from Chiso’s archives, with one important but subtle update.

“If you have a closer look at this piece, we added the butterfly, because I wanted to add a story into the new kimono,” Daisuke Shiba, Chiso’s chief brand officer, tells T&C. “So here we have flowers, old flowers, and all the flowers are blooming beautifully, so that is enticing the butterfly. The color of Hibiki—this dark purple—is used for the butterfly.”

The design from Chiso’s archives.

Rachel King

The new kimono made for Hibiki.

Rachel KingRachel King

This campaign will run throughout 2026 across markets including the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Japan, China, Australia, and Brazil, among others. The kimono from the film will also be moved from Chiso’s design studio in Kyoto to a display at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York at a date to be announced later.

For Sawai, the Hibiki partnership joins existing ambassador roles with Cartier and Dior. Born in New Zealand and raised in Japan from the age of 10, she made her acting debut at 11 and has worked steadily since, starting in a Japanese television production of Annie as a child and later garnering international acclaim for the Apple TV+ drama Pachinko. This September, she will appear in the heist film How to Rob a Bank, co-starring Nicholas Hoult, Christian Slater, and Zoë Kravitz. She will also co-star in Enemies opposite Austin Butler and Jeremy Allen White. Looking further on the horizon, she has also been cast as Yoko Ono in Sam Mendes’s series of biopics, The Beatles—A Four-Film Cinematic Event, due in April 2028.

Rachel King (she/her) is a news writer at Town & Country. Before joining T&C, she spent nearly a decade as an editor at Fortune. Her work covering travel and lifestyle has appeared in Forbes, Observer, Robb Report, Cruise Critic, and Cool Hunting, among others. Originally from San Francisco, she lives in New York with her wife, their daughter, and a precocious labradoodle. Follow her on Instagram at @rk.passport.