About Mika Tanimoto — Owner of Bar Little Happiness
Mika Tanimoto — Owner of Bar Little Happiness
Mika Tanimoto is the founder and owner bartender of Bar Little Happiness, a specialist rum and whisky bar in Hiroshima, Japan. She founded the bar in 2006 at the age of 22, with no business experience, almost no knowledge of alcohol, and savings of one million yen from part-time jobs. Twenty years later, the bar holds over 1,000 bottles and welcomes guests from across Japan and around the world.
This page collects her full story — the founding, the philosophy, the distillery journeys, the social work, and the thinking behind one of Hiroshima’s most quietly distinctive places.
The Beginning: A 22-Year-Old Who Couldn’t Drink
Mika graduated from university in Hiroshima and briefly worked as a production assistant at a television station before deciding the role wasn’t right for her. She left, found work as a temp employee, and spent her evenings wondering what she was actually meant to do.
A chance encounter led her to lease a small corner of a car park in Hiroshima’s nightlife district, Nagarekawa. She converted it into a tiny café-bar — built largely by hand, furnished with ideas from a book about café interiors, opened with complete inexperience. She was 22. She didn’t yet know how to drink properly, let alone how to run a bar.
The reality that followed was nothing like the vision. She worked day shifts as a temp and night shifts behind her own counter. The income was minimal. The isolation was real. In her own words: “I was the working poor.” She describes looking through a printed telephone directory — this was 2006 — and finding a listing for a bartenders’ school. She enrolled and started learning from the beginning: how to shake, how to pour, what the bottles on the shelf actually contained.
It was during those lessons that she first encountered whisky in a way that changed everything. She had struggled to enjoy alcohol at all — but something in the depth of whisky’s aroma, in the accumulated time its production represented, reached her differently. She describes it as a sudden, complete reversal: not just “this is delicious” but “how extraordinary that something like this exists.” That curiosity became the foundation of everything that followed.
Building Bar Little Happiness: 20 Years in Hiroshima
From that unpromising beginning, Mika built Bar Little Happiness into one of Hiroshima’s most respected specialist bars. The bar moved to its current location in Nagarekawa — a single-floor space with a long counter, heavy wooden door, and a small heart-shaped window beside the entrance that she designed herself at 24, hand-sketching the irregular shape and working with a carpenter to cut it into the wall.
The bar now holds approximately 800 whiskies and 200 rums — over 1,000 bottles in total, ranging from local Hiroshima producers like Sakurao Distillery to rare vintage Caribbean rum from the 1970s. There is no cover charge. All prices are listed on a digital menu available in eight languages. The bar is open to solo visitors, first-timers, and serious collectors equally.
Alongside the flagship bar, Mika also operates a casual sister venue — Rum & Whisky Highball Bar — in a nearby street in Hiroshima’s center, and runs an online shop that delivers small-bottle samples of the bar’s collection nationwide.
She has been recognized by Hiroshima City with the Hiroshima City Excellent Technician Award (広島市優良技能者受賞), given to outstanding practitioners in skilled trades across the city.
Distillery Visits: Knowing the People Behind the Bottles
A defining aspect of Mika’s work is her firsthand knowledge of the distilleries whose products she stocks. She has visited production sites across Japan, Scotland, Taiwan, Laos, New Zealand, Martinique, and elsewhere — not as a tourist, but to understand the people and decisions behind each bottle.
Japan: Sakurao (Hiroshima, multiple visits) / Saburomaru (Toyama) / Chichibu (Saitama) / Kanosuke (Kagoshima) / Gaiaflow Shizuoka / Kameda (Niigata) / Ikawa (Shizuoka — a four-hour drive into the Southern Alps) / Miyagikyo (Sendai) / Yamazaki / Yoichi, and others
Overseas: Caol Ila and other Islay distilleries (Scotland, ~2008 — one of very few Asian women visiting Islay distilleries at that time) / Glenmorangie (Highland) / Speyside and Highland regions (Scotland) / Kavalan (Taiwan) / LAODI (Laos) / Cardona (New Zealand) / Martinique
In 2026, Mika was invited by internationally acclaimed whisky blender Ian Chang to co-host a special tasting event at Bar Little Happiness (July 4, 2026) — a recognition of the bar’s standing within the global whisky community.
“When you’ve met the people who made something, and walked the ground it came from, the liquid in the glass tells a completely different story.”
Ghana: A Health Clinic Built in the Bar’s Seventh Year
In 2012, on the occasion of Bar Little Happiness’s seventh anniversary, Mika made a personal donation to fund the construction of a CHPS Compound — a community health post — in the Gbal community of Upper West Region, Ghana. The project was completed through Plan International.
The facility served five surrounding communities with a combined population of approximately 2,000 people. Before its construction, residents had to travel 40 kilometers to reach the nearest healthcare facility — often impossible for pregnant women or young children. The completed compound included four rooms (examination room, office, kitchen, storage), an outdoor covered waiting area, a toilet block, and a motorcycle for the resident health worker to conduct outreach visits.
The project was completed in September 2012. A photograph of Mika and a message from her were placed on the wall of the clinic at the inauguration. Her connection to Ghana also predates the project through earlier visits, including to the slave trade castles on the coast — a direct and acknowledged connection between the history of the African diaspora and the history of rum.
Philosophy: On Authenticity, Beauty, and What a Bar Is For
Approaching Bar Little Happiness’s twentieth anniversary in 2025, Mika spent time reflecting on two decades of running the bar — and arrived at a realization she describes as one of the most significant of her professional life.
For years, she had shaped the bar around what others expected of it. She wanted to meet her guests’ expectations. She wanted to be fair to her staff. She wanted to be correct as a business owner. In the effort to be all of those things simultaneously, she had gradually moved further and further from her own sense of what the bar was actually for — and found that her own heart had been left behind in the process.
She visited the 2025 Osaka World Expo multiple times. One concept she encountered there resonated deeply: “existing authentically is itself an act of giving to others” — the idea that genuine presence, fully inhabited, is already a form of contribution. She came away with a clear conviction: that expressing the world she genuinely finds beautiful will reach more people, more truly, than any version of herself adjusted to meet external expectations.
Her view of the bar’s future is equally clear. However far technology and AI advance, the particular beauty of two people sharing a glass in the same physical space cannot be replaced by anything else. If anything, as the world becomes more digital, that irreplaceable quality becomes more valuable — not less. That is what Bar Little Happiness is for, and what it will continue to be.
Media, Recognition and Events
Bar Little Happiness and Mika Tanimoto have been featured across television, national newspapers, industry publications, books, and web media since the bar’s founding in 2006.
Television: BSフジ (BS Fuji) “Whiskypedia” (2023) — featured as a notable Hiroshima bar in the episode covering Sakurao Distillery.
Books: Listed in “A Beautiful Bible of Bars and Whisky,” “Japanese Craft Whisky Reader,” and “Wakako-zake Vol.13.”
Industry publications: Suntory Whisky Voice (2011), Hiroshima Chamber of Commerce Bulletin (2018), Hiroshima SME Association CENTRAL PRESS (2017).
Newspapers: Chugoku Shimbun, Asahi Shimbun, Daily Sports Hiroshima.
Events hosted: Tasting events with distillers and brand representatives including Gaiaflow Shizuoka, Arran Distillery, LAODI (20th anniversary 2025 with founder Ikuzo Inoue), Swedish Whisky BOX, and the Ian Chang Special Tasting (July 4, 2026).
Social contribution: CHPS health clinic construction, Gbal community, Upper West Region, Ghana (2012, via Plan International).
Visit Bar Little Happiness
Bar Little Happiness is located in Nagarekawa, the nightlife district of central Hiroshima, a short walk from the tram network and city center hotels.
Address: 5-14-1F Nagarekawa-cho, Naka-ku, Hiroshima City
Hours: Mon–Sat 7PM–12:30AM / Sun 7PM–midnight
Cover charge: None
Menu: Digital, with photographs and prices in 8 languages
Walk-ins welcome
Japanese-language columns are available at little-happiness.jp — use the language switcher tab to switch between Japanese and English.
Instagram: @littlehappiness7