Written by Mika Tanimoto, Owner-Bartender, Bar Little Happiness — Hiroshima’s specialist whisky & rum bar with 1,000+ bottles
By the time we reached the fourth and final part of my conversations with Inoue-san during my visit to LAODI Distillery in Laos, I had been trying to understand the same question for two days: why did he stay?
After the original consortium collapsed. After his wife considered leaving him. After years of fighting through regulations, political complexity, near-bankruptcy, and the particular loneliness of building something in a country that was not his own — why did he keep choosing to be there?
A Winery in the Mountains of Nagano
His answer did not begin in Laos. It began at a winery in Nagano Prefecture, years before the idea of LAODI existed.
Inoue had become a member of a small winery run by an essayist — the kind of intimate, membership-only operation that exists at the edges of Japan’s food and drink world. He scraped together the membership fee to attend a party there one evening. When he arrived, he found himself sitting alongside well-known actresses and television personalities — people who, in ordinary life, occupied a completely different social sphere from his own.
And then, as the evening progressed — the wine shared, the food passed around, the light fading over the mountains — those distinctions simply dissolved. He sat next to someone famous and talked as easily as he would have with a neighbour at home. The wine had done something that no introduction or formal setting could: it had removed the partition between people.
“Making alcohol,” he said to me, “is making a place for people to gather.”
A decade later, he returned to the same winery for another party. The guests were different. But as soon as the first glass was poured, the warmth returned immediately.
“Alcohol is interesting. It jumps over everything — position, gender, age — and lets people meet each other as people.”
The Harvest
On the last day of my visit, the group I had travelled with went to the sugarcane fields together. We cut cane with our own hands and watched it pressed into juice on the spot — vivid, sweet, green and alive in a way that bottled rum can only gesture toward.
Covered in mud, working alongside people I had met only days before, I understood something about why the distillery exists in the way it does. Not as a business positioned in a gap in the rum market. Not as a Japanese person’s experiment in a foreign country. But as an attempt to create a place — physical and social — where people meet each other as people, over something made from the ground under their feet.
The last glass of LAODI I drank in Hiroshima tasted different after that trip.
LAODI bottles are available at Bar Little Happiness, Hiroshima. Read the full Japanese column: little-happiness.jp/columns/laodi-distillery-visit-vol4/
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