[Part 3] Continuing, Alone
2025.5.08
I’m Mika Tanimoto, and I run Bar Little Happiness, a whisky and rum bar in Nagarekawa, Hiroshima.
I opened it in 2006, at 22.
I hired staff, and for seventeen years I ran as an organization, holding to one belief: to build an industry where bartenders could be happy, materially and otherwise.
How I came to let that go is written in Parts 1 and 2.
This third part is about how things stand now that I’ve chosen to continue alone, and about the real acceptance I arrived at on the way.
I wrote it hoping it reaches anyone standing in front of similar questions — running a bar, or running any small business.
[Part 1] I Stopped Trying to Reach Everyone
[Part 2] Letting Go of the Organization
And now, I run this bar alone.
Not out of loneliness, and not out of distrust of anyone.
If anything, it was chasing the ideal that brought me here —
I arrived at being alone quite naturally.
I had wanted to reach that ideal shape with someone.
But however hard I thought and moved, I could never hold within myself a business model that would make it work.
In the bottles lined up in front of me
are cut the intent, the love, and the history of each person who made them.
At some point I saw it clearly: without hunting for what each person wanted from me,
there were people who settled here comfortably, the way a piece fits into place.
A comfortable relationship isn’t something you go looking for. It’s something that overlaps on its own.
Once I had that, exhausting every word, or getting ahead of what someone might feel,
turned out not to be necessary after all.
To bring about the kind of meetings this room suits, I quietly reworked how people arrive here.
So that it reaches, gently, the people for whom this works both ways — with whisky and rum as the given.
The result is that I now take more than I did when I employed staff, working alone, and for fewer hours.
That could only have grown out of the years already put in, and the people who walked them with me.
What I sacrificed of myself back then, and how I am now — I can see both as time that mattered.
I once held a large dream: to change the structure of this industry.
That dream didn’t come true.
And even that, now, I can take cleanly.
I think I’ve come through one phase of things.
Real acceptance isn’t some glittering, miraculous event.
It’s a feeling that comes down quietly, after facing reality head-on and living through all the doubt and conflict.
Across three pieces, I’ve set down how this place came to be, and the shape of it.
If you’d like, the index page for the three will take you through them in order.
▶︎ What nineteen years behind a bar brought me to
* The photograph is from Cape Coast Castle, which I visited while I was in Ghana.
In a place where countless lives lost anywhere to go, and had their voices taken,
someone had quietly left a heart made of flowers. Looking at what was lost,
and still meaning to leave something for what comes after.
The quiet of that place held something other than grief — a prayer about carrying things on.
About the author: Mika Tanimoto
President and owner-bartender of Bar Little Happiness in Nagarekawa, Hiroshima. Opened in 2006; twenty years as of 2026. She runs a bar holding over 1,000 whiskies and rums single-handedly, visits distilleries in Japan and abroad herself, and writes Notes on Whisky and Rum, a column built on conversations with the people who make the spirits.
