Saburomaru Distillery, Part 4: “We Had Nothing to Lose”
2026.2.07
“Not the family name, and not the capital. What was there was the plain, unglamorous work of going door to door himself — and the resolve to say plainly: we had nothing to lose.”
A stage that works on all five senses. The Taisho warehouse, a registered cultural property, and the whisky one family refused to let go out
Open the door at Saburomaru and what opens up in front of you is a stage.
What Saburomaru is: a registered cultural property, and a light one family kept burning
The building came through the war intact, and is now a Registered Tangible Cultural Property.
Look along the old panels on the wall and you see them: people thrown about by their times, who never let the whisky go out on this ground.
Reading Inagaki’s book, I became certain of one thing. The man is a whisky obsessive, right through.
Nobody takes the rises and falls of an industry apart in that much detail on ordinary enthusiasm.
More than any duty to protect his great-grandfather’s spirit, he is the one most excited by the romance of this amber liquid.
It spilled out of the edges of everything he said.
(The book I bought in the shop is essential reading. I regretted not having read it before going — the history of Japanese whisky is packed into it. It’s fairly technical, so skimming the parts that interest you works well.)
Setting aside the idea of the heir to a fortune. A man covered in dirt, loving whisky, and the hardcore obsessive underneath
I’m embarrassed to say I knew nothing of his background until we met. From others, I’d occasionally heard envy about how privileged his position was, with something like jealousy mixed in.
But face to face, what came into view was nothing that could be contained by words like that.
Far from settling into the shelter a family name provides, here was someone taken more deeply by this amber liquid than anyone, running about in the dirt of it — a whisky obsessive right through.
The Inagaki family founded Hokuriku Coca-Cola after the war, and now sits on a solid base as a holding company with interests across IT and other fields.
He himself started in Coca-Cola’s corporate planning department, and could have walked straight on into managing the group.
There was no particular need to throw himself into a distillery that was falling apart, producing less than a tenth of what it once had.
But even if the group as a whole survived, if the fire his great-grandfather lit here at Saburomaru went out, the family would lose what it is.
Born into that family, he must have felt that more sharply than anyone. (My own reading of it.)
Door to door across Toyama. The trust he gathered on foot, one drop at a time, and how it lit Saburomaru again
The money behind this rebuilding.
It came through crowdfunding, still an unusual thing at the time.
People were asking what crowdfunding even was, and he set the whole thing moving more or less alone.
I wanted to know, so I asked him.
“I heard most of it came from people in Toyama. Did you go round to them yourself?”
He answered with that guileless smile, lightly.
“I went to every house. A lot of them were older people who had never used a computer, so I’d sit with them and work the screen together — press here, that sort of thing.”
Picturing that, my respect for him went as deep as it could go.
He had gone out on his own feet, gathering local trust carefully, one drop at a time.
The success of that campaign, built on that patient work, surely brought more than money.
The cool air around it — can whisky really sell? — must have shifted sharply into something else: this many local people are behind us, so we have to do this properly.
Not wanting the fire to go out stopped being one man’s wish, and came together as something invented jointly, with the people of Toyama.
The play behind the world’s best whisky visitor experience. Welcome to a grown-up’s hideout, and the World Whiskies Awards 2026 top honour that came with it
Every step further into the distillery pulls a visitor — a whisky drinker above all — deeper into Saburomaru’s world.
Scattered everywhere are devices he saw at distilleries around the world and fell for on the spot.
How do you make whisky as interesting as it can possibly be? A grown-up’s hideout, built out of play and curiosity going off in every direction.
The detail in it is such that you can’t stop being excited just looking.
I want to come every week.
Getting the statue back
That love turns, at times, into something fierce.
The clearest case: recovering his great-grandfather’s bronze statue.
It had been moved somewhere with no connection to whisky. He brought it back, saying: I want my great-grandfather to see the whisky we’re making now, because it’s the most interesting it’s ever been.
Nothing to lose, and the most exciting future in the world. Turning the weight of tradition into fuel
However solid your capital, few people can give an ideal shape at this heat and this speed.
I asked whether it hadn’t frightened him, taking on a family business that was shrinking. He answered with a smile that had something almost innocent in it.
“We were in something that was about to stop breathing. So I thought: we’ve got nothing to lose.”
Nothing to lose.
That conviction took the weight called tradition and turned it into fuel for the most exciting whisky-making in the world.
Not carrying tradition as a burden, but painting over it with a future as exciting as it gets.
His face in that moment — a boy’s curiosity and a businessman’s sharp eye living in the same expression — I won’t forget it as long as I live.
(Saburomaru was named the world’s best whisky visitor attraction at the World Whiskies Awards 2026. Congratulations!)
Next time, the final part.
What kind of whisky is Saburomaru aiming at? What I saw of their future, in a blending room kept out of sight.
【A note from Mika】 This article is built on my own visit to the distillery, but parts of it are my own reading and interpretation. Please take it as one whisky lover thinking out loud.
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.
【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.
The back bar holds over 1,000 bottles, from rare and hard-to-find releases to Sakurao, made here in Hiroshima.
• More than one bar: alongside the main bar, she runs a casual sister venue, the Rum & Whisky Highball Bar.
• Online: an online shop sending selected bottles across Japan in small measures.
• Writing: her column, Notes on Whisky and Rum.
・The founding story: At 22, working poor, and the light I found.
Whisky and rum taste better when you know the hearts behind them.
