Stir ingredients with ice, strain into small cocktail glass. (Original instructions say shake.) Add pickled rakyyo to drink--original says to "add some crushed rakyyo" but I prefer to stir a whole or half rakyyo with the drink, then skewer it (or a new one) for the serve after straining. Crushed rakyyo at the bottom is messy, and rather strong on the final sip or two.
This is an early Japanese variation of a sweet herbal Gibson. The savory aspects of the rakyyo (pickled Chinese scallion) provide a unique flavor to the drink.
The original volumes were 1/3 oz each, equal parts summing to 1 oz with 2 dashes bitters (1.5 oz cocktail glasses were used by Café Line.) I have changed this to a still somewhat small/modern format drink but with more manageable 3/4 oz portions with 4 dashes of bitters.
The choice of vermouth can alter the perceived sweetness a lot in this drink, so play with the ratio of gin to Benedictine to dial in the flavor profile desired.
This was one of two signature drinks by Tokyo's Café Line in the 1924 "Kokuteeru", but it isn't clear if bartender Yonekishi Maeda created them--although this seems likely.
Most of the other drinks in "Kokuteeru" can be traced to the 1922 book by Vermeire, some to Kappeler's 1895 work, a few to Ensslin's 1917 publication as well as a few others (Boothby, Johnson, Straub.) Since Maeda translated and wrote the names phonetically in Japanese, and they have been translated back to English, a number of the cocktail names are garbled or incomplete in the 2022 reprint--I have a list of about 10 corrected at this time and tied back to their sources. There are a few others that appear either original, combinations of other preceding cocktails with the same name, or so completely altered as to be unrecognizable as to origin.
"Kokuteeru", 1924, by Yonekichi Maeda, translated and reprinted in English in 2022 (p. 61)