The Day I Tore Up the Settlement Letter｜20 Memories Vol.7

2026.10.18

In short: Vol. 7 of “20 Memories” for the 20th anniversary of Bar Little Happiness in Hiroshima. In my early twenties, after being told to leave the parking-lot café-bar where it all began, I paid a year’s rent up front to get this spot in Nagarekawa. No bank would lend to me, so my father signed as guarantor without a question. Then the interior contractor vanished, the opening slipped a month, and I tore up the lawyer’s settlement letter. What those years taught me about contracts, hiring, and the law. By Mika Tanimoto.

Thanks — 20th Anniversary: Twenty Memories, Vol. 7

Back issues　vol.1　vol.2　vol.3　vol.4　vol.5　vol.6

“If it still doesn’t work out, I’ll give up.”

I had more or less pried the landlord’s bank account out of him, and paid a full year’s rent, in full, up front.

I was in my early twenties.

I just had to have this place.

A tiny café-bar in a parking lot

Bar Little Happiness began as a tiny café-bar, renting a corner of a parking lot.

I spent about a year and a half there.

One day, a TV crew happened to come to film that parking lot.

The crew found me amusing, and I was on screen for all of twenty seconds.

From there, bars I’d never even heard of started sending people my way, and customers came pouring in all at once.

The tiny café-bar, which doubled as the parking lot’s waiting area, was packed night after night.

…And then.

This time, that became a complaint from the customers using the parking lot.

The landlord said, “I’d like you to leave.”

Honestly, I didn’t want to move.

The bar was popular, and it was making real money.

No bank would lend to me

Once I decided to relocate, I learned a few things for the first time.

I hadn’t understood anything.

Looking for a new place, a young woman on her own gets looked down on, and nobody would show me a decent property.

The current location is on the ground floor, with several competing bars nearby. Even so, I just had to have this place.

Two things decided it.

The management company happened to know that my previous bar had been thriving, and they backed me.

And that up-front payment I mentioned at the start.

The entire cost of the move was borrowed money.

But on my own credit alone, not a single bank would lend to me.

Actually, until then, I hadn’t told my parents that I was running a bar.

I came clean for the first time in order to ask them to be my guarantors.

“If Mika is doing it, she must see some chance of winning.”

My father said something like that, and signed the guarantor line without asking a single question.

My mother worried the whole time, and kept telling me not to.

Twenty years have passed since then.

For the 20th anniversary, I gave my parents a trip on a luxury cruise ship.

A present for the father who signed without asking anything.

The contractor vanished

At last, the new place was settled.

But then the interior contractor started saying things that didn’t match what we’d first agreed.

When I pushed back, he disappeared.

He probably thought I was easy to push around.

The opening slipped by a full month.

The place was left half-finished and exposed, and I was at a loss.

This was an era with little information online, and no social media.

I had no way to contact my customers. My financial plan was thrown way off.

All I could do was put up a big notice outside.

Later, a letter arrived from his lawyer, proposing a settlement.

The amount was so small.

I was so frustrated that I tore it to shreds and threw it away.

Looking back, I should have just taken the money (laughs).

Frustrated, and frightened

The truth is, I was as frightened as I was frustrated.

What do I do now?

But that experience changed me.

However much it costs, get a lawyer involved.

Put every promise properly in writing.

Before deciding anything, think through where the law stands, and only then move.

As it happens, I studied law at university.

…Not that I was much of a law student (laughs).

Even so, what I learned there turned out, unexpectedly, to be a huge help.

The basic way of thinking in civil law.

When you go by the law, what counts as justice?

That yardstick supported me not only in the contractor affair, but when hiring people, and whenever trouble came up.

That said, because I only half-knew the law, I tried to make everything perfectly clean, and it was only after it was all over that I realized how much that had been hurting me.

I noticed later that the world is full of gray areas.

Maybe the only ones who keep everything perfectly by the book are the listed companies.

Opening up one evening

Staff were a real struggle, too.

One evening, as I went to open the bar, I found a staff member asleep on the floor.

Calls from the local police — “One of your staff…” — were a regular thing.

Going to pick them up, from the police station, from the hospital.

They were people whose values were so very different from the world I’d grown up in.

But that experience became a turning point.

I stopped hiring people on the word of someone I barely knew, and started recruiting through Hello Work, Japan’s public employment office, and job sites.

I put the hiring conditions in order, one by one.

That was where Bar Little Happiness began walking toward becoming an “organization.”

In the end, I limited hiring to university graduates.

Highly educated people began to apply.

None of it was wasted

Those twenty seconds on TV, and being told to leave.

A year’s rent paid up front, and the settlement letter I tore up.

The calls from the police, and the staff member asleep on the floor.

Back then, I was simply desperate.

Frustrated, frightened, wondering what to do — and still, every night, I opened the bar.

“If it still doesn’t work out, I’ll give up.”

That was how I got this place.

Nearly twenty years on, I still stand behind the counter in that same place.

Every time I see the face of a customer opening the door and coming in, now and then, I remember who I was back then.

Me in my early twenties, trembling as I wired the rent.

It’s all right.

None of it was wasted.

Thanks — 20th Anniversary: Twenty Memories, Vol. 7

---

“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.

---