Cape Coast Castle and Rum｜Why I Built a Clinic in Ghana
2026.8.09
Thanks — 20th Anniversary: Twenty Memories, Vol. 6
Back issues
vol.1 At 22, working poor, and the light I found.
vol.2 Back to the start in year twenty: moving the one person in front of you.
vol.3 Years of light and dark. What I longed for, and what was real.
vol.4 [It was all meant to be] One night, connected by an article from nine years ago.
vol.5 A memory I’m ashamed of, from when I was arrogant.
The time I built a clinic in Ghana
“That’s just wanting to be seen, isn’t it.”
“Isn’t that a waste of money?”
“I built a clinic in Ghana” —
That’s what came back at me when I said it.
I was young then, and I listened to those words too closely.
Far too closely.
So for a long time, I couldn’t tell anyone about it.
At this mark, looking back on twenty years, I want to try writing it down.
I wanted to leave something behind
I’ve always been drawn to volunteering, that sort of thing.
I wanted to become someone who could do that kind of thing.
Someone who could do something for another person.
That wish had been sitting deep in me for a long time.
In 2012, our seventh year since opening.
I was 28.
One thing was certain about those first seven years: they had been full of warm people whose paths crossed with ours. I wanted to leave that feeling in some kind of form.
While I was thinking that way, I came across a project building a clinic in a village in Ghana, West Africa.
Looking back on it now.
That clinic was also, to me, a kind of proof of how hard I had worked to get there.
I used every bit of savings I could take with me.
I think some part of me wanted it to cost me everything.
What I saw in Ghana
The children were purely delighted with the gifts I’d brought.
The village held a huge ceremony for us. Even the kings turned out, all of them.
As a welcome gift, they gave me a goat.
…and having received it, what exactly do I do with this?! Ha.
The thing I had built was really standing there.
One very small, very limited place in the world.
Still, maybe I had been of some use to someone.
I remember how happy that made me.
What I meant, and what was in front of me
But what I saw there was not what I had imagined.
The presents I had brought for the village children.
Local staff working on the project were putting them into their own bags.
I was surrounded and pressed: dig us a well next.
The children were in clothes that seemed to be more hole than cloth, while the adults running the project wore bright, beautiful things.
So this is what it looks like when poverty becomes a business.
I had known the phrase. Only the phrase.
I had understood nothing of what it actually meant.
I had come with nothing but good intentions, and what was in front of me left me uneasy in a way I couldn’t settle.
I couldn’t put it into words.
Our local guide told me something.
UNICEF and all sorts of aid organizations come and build all sorts of things.
But often, he said, the building is where it ends.
Maybe the clinic I built was one of those.
Maybe it was just one small part of that same business.
And still, I’m glad I did it
Even after I got back to Japan, those words stayed lodged in me.
“Wanting to be seen.”
“A waste of money.”
“There’s no point.”
I had moved on nothing but good intentions.
And in someone else’s eyes, it looked like something else entirely.
What I saw in Ghana, and what was said to me in Japan.
Neither would leave me, for a long time.
So I told no one.
But this is how I’ve come to think about it now.
Rather than lining up pretty words and doing nothing,
I’d rather be someone who moved — clumsily, wrongly, but moved.
I’m glad I went to that village.
I’m glad I built that clinic.
I can say that clearly now.
There was one more place on that trip I’ve never forgotten
The clinic story has a second half.
On the same trip, I went to a place called Cape Coast.
About 3 hours 30 minutes by car from the capital, Accra.
A castle on the sea, listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Today it looks like a beautiful castle.
Against the blue water, fishermen went on fishing as though time had stopped.
But this was once a place where enslaved people were held and shipped out.
Inside the dungeon it was truly pitch dark, and only a hole high up gave off a strange, wrong kind of light.
People were packed in so tightly they couldn’t sit.
No one who was put in here ever came back.
The building was put up in the first place for the timber and gold trade.
Then it came to be used for the slave trade across the Atlantic.
An unthinkable number of people were “shipped” out from here.
A life connects up
At that castle, I learned what the triangular trade actually was.
The trade that linked Europe, Africa and the Caribbean.
But to me, back then, it was still just a tourist site.
It hadn’t once crossed my mind that I would open a rum bar.
That triangular trade was the very root of how rum spread across the world.
I wouldn’t come to know that as my own business until a little later.
Two or three years later, I opened a bar built around rum.
That bar has since closed, but the rum I started collecting then still sits on the shelves at Bar Little Happiness.
Every time I explain where rum comes from, I arrive at that triangular trade.
That was when it finally connected.
That castle I stopped at “while I was there” in Ghana ran straight into the deepest part of the work I do now.
One more thing I thought about at that castle
President Obama visited this castle in 2009, and said this:
“…sometimes we can tolerate and stand by great evil even as we think that we’re doing good.”
What you believe to be right is not necessarily right.
Those words have followed me ever since.
In running a business, for instance
As someone running a company, I had my own sense of what was right.
But that isn’t necessarily everyone else’s.
Even so, rather than do nothing, I’ve chosen to decide and move.
While doubting my own rightness.
Because to build the world I find beautiful with my own hands, I thought that doubt was necessary.
The business and that clinic were surely the same thing.
It was all meant to be
The gap Ghana forced on me, between what I meant and what was real.
The cruelty I learned about at a slave trade castle.
The rum that the triangular trade carried across the world.
Doubting my own rightness.
They’re scattered in pieces all through my twenty years.
And yet, looking back like this.
Every one of them has certainly shaped who I am now.
The clinic in Ghana, and the business.
Both ended somewhere other than where I first pictured them.
Even so.
I’m glad I did them.
I mean that now, all the way through.
There is a Japanese word, hitsuzen — the idea that something was always going to happen. All of it, I think, was that.
This is my memory of Ghana.
(I’ve written about the business side in more detail on another post.)
Thanks — 20th Anniversary: Twenty Memories, Vol. 6
Every encounter is meant to be. Welcome to the world of Rum & Whisky.
Related posts
Thanks — 20th Anniversary: Twenty Memories, Vol. 6
Back issues
vol.1 At 22, working poor, and the light I found.
vol.2 Back to the start in year twenty: moving the one person in front of you.
vol.3 Years of light and dark. What I longed for, and what was real.
vol.4 [It was all meant to be] One night, connected by an article from nine years ago.
vol.5 A memory I’m ashamed of, from when I was arrogant.
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Open almost every day of the year
Reservations and enquiries via our official LINE 🥃
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About the author
Mika Tanimoto
President, Little.m Inc. / owner-bartender
Owner of Bar Little Happiness, a rum and whisky bar in Hiroshima now in its twentieth year. Since opening in 2006, she has worked as a specialist in passing on what moves her about whisky and rum.
She visits distilleries around the world herself, and what she knows comes first-hand, from talking directly with the people who make the spirits. The back bar holds over 1,000 bottles, from rare and hard-to-find releases to Sakurao, made here in Hiroshima.
Definitely very recommended, I hope to be able to come back here in a future Japan trip! Thank you so much, cheers from Italy!
