Ikuma Hayashi, founder and chairman of the Japan Tequila Association, took his first shot of tequila in 1992 on the Los Angeles set of the film Rising Sun, handed to him by actor Sean Connery. He has spent the decades since building Japan's infrastructure for the spirit.
The Japan Times profiled Hayashi, now 58, on October 4, 2026, tracing a path from a Tokyo teenager who left for film school to a man described as one of the country's foremost tequila authorities. An earlier profile by Japan Today, published when Hayashi was 41 and already chairman of the association, corroborates the broad outline of his career.
What happened on the set of Rising Sun
According to the Japan Times, Hayashi left Tokyo for Los Angeles at 18 to study film, and after graduating joined the art production team at 20th Century Fox. In 1992 he was assigned to handle the Japanese props for Rising Sun, the 1993 thriller starring Connery and Wesley Snipes. At the wrap party, Connery offered him a shot of Chinaco, a premium tequila. Hayashi was a teetotaler whom alcohol typically gave terrible hangovers, but he could not refuse the actor. He drank, expecting to suffer for it.
How a hangover free shot became a career
Japan Today's earlier account fills in what came next: Hayashi, introduced to 100% agave tequila by a coworker, found he could drink it without the headaches that had put him off alcohol in the first place. That discovery sent him looking for the source. He visited the Cuervo Tequila Museum in Mexico, and rather than returning to Japan each year when his U.S. visa expired, he started touring distilleries instead. Over the following years he visited more than 50 of them. By the time Japan Today interviewed him, he held the chairmanship of the Japan Tequila Association, coaching airlines and hotels on how to serve the drink and running seminars for businesses and individuals. He told the outlet his own preference had migrated from aged tequila to blanco over time, a shift he described as a matter of taste rather than hierarchy.
What the Japan Tequila Association does
The association's footprint shows up elsewhere in Japan's small but organized agave spirits trade. Sakesho Kin'emon, a Tokyo gallery devoted to agave spirits, states that its buyers hold Tequila Maestro certification from the Japan Tequila Association, alongside Mezcalero certification from the Japan Mezcal Association, a parallel body covering mezcal. That pairing points to an education and certification apparatus built up over roughly two decades, separate from the distilleries or import companies that move bottles into the country.
What is documented and what is not
The throughline between the two profiles, published roughly sixteen years apart, is consistent: a Tokyo native who left for film school, encountered agave spirits through the Hollywood pipeline, and converted that encounter into a standing role coaching Japan's hospitality industry. Neither account gives a precise founding date for the Japan Tequila Association, and no figures on its current membership, seminar volume, or certification numbers appear in either piece. Chinaco, the tequila that started it, was itself a pioneer import to the United States in the 1980s before Hayashi encountered it on a film set a decade later, though the Japan Times account does not connect those two threads directly.
What this means
Chinaco does not currently appear among the houses in this publication's bottle database, so no score attaches to the brand that started Hayashi's conversion. His story is also a reminder that tequila advocacy and tequila certification are different things: a Tequila Maestro credential from an association like his speaks to training and palate, not to the third-party organic certification this site checks against public registers.