[Part 2] Letting Go of Growth｜Seventeen Years Trying to Build a Company
2025.5.08
—— Holding an ideal, carrying it, and finally letting it go ——
I run Bar Little Happiness, a whisky and rum bar in Nagarekawa, Hiroshima.
I opened it in 2006, at 22.
When I was young, I genuinely wanted to change the structure of this industry.
Years spent running, trying to build a new way of working alongside people who shared what I believed.
And as the years went on, something in it was wearing down, a little at a time.
This second part is about what I entrusted to the shape of an organization, and how I came to quietly let it go.
A note for readers outside Japan: taking someone on as a full-time employee here means taking on their livelihood, often for years — and, in this industry, an unspoken expectation that they will come to share what the owner believes in. That is the shape I was trying to build.
I used to run the company with an ideal in my chest: to build an industry where people who love bartending and carry some intent could be happy, materially and otherwise.
Building standing and stability for the industry, together with my staff — I took that as my purpose, and found even the meaning of my existence in it.
I wanted to put the best conditions I could in place, and to repay people’s effort. But putting those conditions in place and holding them there was not simple. I stretched as far as I could stretch, filling gaps as hard as I was able, day after day.
What I was aiming at was a structure that didn’t extract from people.
The way this industry leans on youth and inexperience never sat right with me.
Service work is designed as something anyone can do. Assume skill or intent as a precondition, and neither hiring nor training holds together.
So it’s precisely by arranging things so anyone can do it that employment and business become possible.
That is the ground this industry stands on.
Plenty of people go beyond that and hold to what they intend, of course. I know people doing wonderful work alone.
But that is a story about people who managed it. It isn’t a system designed so that many people can.
In most of the real world, the structure only holds up by pulling the premise of employing people toward: anyone can do this.
And the people working are folded into it inside the reassurance of being thanked, never seeing what the structure actually is.
In a sense the relationship looks like a win for both sides. And through those thank-yous, it quietly takes away the power to open up a future.
Work that deserves far more pride gets made small under the premise that anyone can do it,
and to make the business hold together, both wages and hopes get shaved down.
I didn’t want to look away from how unhealthy that is.
Accepting it would have meant doing the very thing I once found repellent.
But changing it required someone who could create profit alongside me. That was essential.
Alone, I couldn’t change the structure.
Find the right person and it’s possible. Train someone and it’ll work out. I used to believe that.
And there were people who tried to walk it with me.
But over time I realised that the moment you make that a precondition, the structure is far too fragile.
In the end it was a system that could only hope for a very narrow set of conditions to line up by chance.
Without changing the structure, no one gets saved.
What drove that home, more than anything, was that I was the one wearing down.
It isn’t that I never wished for one person facing the same direction, at the same temperature.
I thirsted for it, the whole time.
But the more I improved the terms of employment, the more I built somewhere people could work without worry,
the more I drew people who would give the job a try, rather than people who would take something on with me.
The place came to be read as somewhere to pause for a while,
chosen as a temporary option on the way to whatever came next in someone’s life.
No one meant any harm by it, of course.
But what was in the air was less any will to achieve something here,
and more a sense of making good use of a place that had been set up well.
What I wanted, even if someone was only staying a while,
was a relationship where we sweated toward the same destination.
Which is exactly why building a system on the premise of meeting such a person
already carried its own danger. I understood that later.
Chasing an ideal while a structure and a set of relationships kept cutting into my body and mind — I began, quietly, to feel where the limit was.
This isn’t any one person’s fault.
Everyone was sincere in their own way, and I never wanted to blame anyone.
Before I knew it, this had been seventeen years of trying, again and again, changing its shape as it went.
If this went on, continuing would turn into enduring.
So rather than adjust the method a little, I put the question back to myself.
── Why am I doing this work?
── What did I want to bring about, and who did I want to face while doing it?
Letting go of the dream of building an organization frightened me, honestly.
But even if it meant releasing what I had carefully built up,
I wanted to protect the world I’d wanted to draw here, with my own hands.
I hadn’t abandoned the ideal.
I’d chosen to protect it by changing its shape.
Lean on how the industry normally does things, and the business would have held up.
Push toward expansion, and I might have drawn something that looked like success.
But then I’d have been reproducing, with my own hands, the very structure I’d wanted to change.
When I accepted the gap between the ideal and the future that reality actually leads to,
I decided to choose not what holds together, but what my own sense of right can accept.
That choice was painful, and it stung.
I thought no one would understand it.
But it was a point I could not have gone around.
＊ Looking back, I learned a great deal in those years myself.
My gratitude to everyone who spent that time with me hasn’t changed.
About where I’ve arrived now, after swinging between that old ideal and reality,
I’ve written a little more.
▶︎
* The photograph is from my first visit to Islay.
When you begin something, you aren’t necessarily full of certainty.
And the sky over that trip, when there was nothing to do but start walking, has stayed with me.
The weight of choosing, and the resolve to go on choosing anyway, may look something like an overcast sky.
