Written by Mika Tanimoto, Owner-Bartender, Bar Little Happiness — Hiroshima’s specialist whisky & rum bar with 1,000+ bottles
The building at Saburomaru Distillery is a national registered tangible cultural property. It survived the fires that swept through Tonami during the war. It holds within it more than a century of whisky history — the kind of history that is mostly loss and silence, punctuated by occasional flashes of survival.
Walking through it feels like entering a stage set — except the stage is real, the props are functional, and every corner reveals something new.
A Distillery Designed by Someone Who Loves Whisky
Inagaki has visited distilleries around the world, and the experience shows. The visitor path through Saburomaru borrows ideas from Scotland, Japan, and several places in between — but they are assembled in a way that is unmistakably his own. Glass panels in the floor reveal fermentation vessels below. Hidden doors open onto unexpected spaces. The building’s wooden skeleton is deliberately exposed, so that the oldest and newest elements of the distillery are visible simultaneously.
At some point during a tour, the ancestor’s bronze statue catches your eye — a founding figure who was once moved to an unrelated location and whom Inagaki brought back to the distillery because, as he explained, he wanted his great-grandfather to see what the place had become.
In 2026, Saburomaru was awarded the WWA’s global recognition for the world’s best whisky visitor experience. This was not entirely surprising to anyone who had been there.
Crowdfunding by Hand
I had read about the 2016 crowdfunding campaign before visiting, but I hadn’t understood it properly until I asked Inagaki directly about how he had reached the local donors.
“I visited them one by one,” he said. “Many older people hadn’t used a computer before, so I would sit with them and say ‘press here, now here.’ “
The campaign raised ¥38 million, with 75% coming from local contributors in Toyama. What the number does not show is the trust that had to be built first — person by person, door by door, in a region where scepticism about a revival project was entirely understandable.
That trust became the foundation for everything that followed.
“Naku te tomodai”
When I asked Inagaki whether taking over a struggling, shrinking family business had frightened him, he smiled with the particular ease of someone who has thought about this many times and arrived somewhere solid.
“Because it was almost gone already,” he said, “I thought: naku te tomodai. It’s fine that we don’t have it. I had nothing to lose.”
Naku te tomodai. The phrase has become something of a Saburomaru philosophy — a kind of cheerful defiance that treats every constraint as an invitation rather than an obstacle. No available pot still? Build a better one. No budget for a proper cooperage? Create the infrastructure the whole industry needs. No precedent for what you’re trying to do? That’s fine. That means no one else has done it yet.
Read the full Japanese column: little-happiness.jp/columns/saburomaru-distillery-report-4/
Bar Little Happiness | Hiroshima, Japan
Rum & Whisky specialists | 1,000+ bottles | English menu available
Open Mon–Sat 7PM–12:30AM, Sun 7PM–midnight
No cover charge. Walk-ins welcome.
english.little-happiness.jp