Hiroshima Whisky Bar｜Twenty Years, and What Changed in Year 21
2026.8.09
It started in the corner of a car park
July 13, 2006.
Just one corner of a car park. This bar began as a coffee shop.
I understood nothing.
Not whisky, not rum, not trade, not running a business.
I could barely drink at all, to begin with.
But back then,
“When a guest is happy, I’m happy.”
That alone was enough to make every day exciting.
One thank you from a guest, and the whole day was worth it.
What changed while I kept running
Twenty years have passed since then.
Balvenie woke me up to whisky,
and New Grove rum took my heart.
Before I knew it, I was walking distilleries around the world on my own two feet.
I hired staff, opened more places, and tried to build an organization around what I believed in.
I was lost in it. I meant every bit of it.
Being judged. Meeting expectations. Keeping it all turning.
For my guests, the market, my staff, everyone around me.
“How do I produce results” always came first, and whether my own heart was actually moving got pushed further and further back.
Something switched on, in the middle of the calm
Until last year, I was becalmed.
After I let go of the organization, I had nothing left to aim at.
Thanks to everything built up over the years, the numbers come in just from opening the door.
Peaceful days, and no sense of what I was doing them for.
Then came January of this year.
I visited Saburomaru Distillery, and it took hold of me completely.
The way Mr. Inagaki, their president, lives — it was just too good.
Every distillery story I’d collected over the years connected inside me, all at once.
I heard the switch flip back on — the one that lets me be moved by things.
After that, wherever my heart moved, I found myself already on my way there.
Toyama, Niigata, Chichibu, Komoro, Sendai, Fukushima, Shizuoka, Kagawa, Taiwan, Laos.
All of that since January alone.
This, I thought. This is it.
What I felt twenty years ago in the corner of that car park —
that same being moved, that same flutter.
Different in shape, but at the root, the same as back then.
So I’m fairly sure I’ll close the bar without warning again, and go somewhere.
Somewhere with a story. Wherever the thing that moves me is being made.
The one most moved by all this is me
In my twenty-first year, I’ve decided something.
First, I follow what excites me.
Whose hands made this whisky, this rum, and out of what kind of life.
Every time I learn that, it still moves me all the way through.
I used to have no time, so I’d talk about it at the bar and that was the end of it.
Now I have time to write it down like this.
The more I write, the more deeply I know the maker, and the more I love what they do.
Not as a critic, not as an expert. Just as the biggest possible fan of makers I love.
I put that feeling into a glass and hand it across the counter.
And then my guests become fans of that distillery too.
What the maker put into it moves through me, and sets off toward someone new…
That is my greatest happiness.
For all these years, running a business meant building around how I’d be judged.
Now: the thing that moves me, over the numbers.
As business goes, that’s probably backwards.
Whether it holds up, I don’t know yet either.
But I’ve decided. This is how I’m going to do it from here.
I once told this to Ian Chang — long the master blender at Kavalan, and now at Komoro Distillery. He wrote back:
“Please keep following your own path. I have every confidence that it will lead you to wonderful places, and I hope our paths will continue to cross for many years to come.”
It felt like a hand at my back, gently.
To everyone traveling this same world
Thank you, truly, for these twenty years.
The joy, the frustration, the sorrow.
There is a Japanese word, hitsuzen — the idea that something was always going to happen. All of it, I think, was that.
To love whisky and rum, and to love the place a bar is.
That alone makes us travelers in the same world.
Let’s keep traveling in this love of whisky and rum together.
Whisky and rum taste better when you know the hearts behind them.
Every encounter is meant to be. Welcome to the world of Rum & Whisky.
(I’ve written these twenty years down here, under the title “Twenty Memories.”)
Thanks — 20th Anniversary: “Twenty Memories” 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 One night, connected by an article from nine years ago.
- vol.5 A memory I’m ashamed of, from when I was arrogant.
- vol.6 The time we built a clinic in Ghana.
