Written by Mika Tanimoto, Owner-Bartender, Bar Little Happiness — Hiroshima’s specialist whisky & rum bar with 1,000+ bottles
I had visited Saburomaru Distillery in my mind a hundred times before I finally made it there in January 2026. I had been stocking their whisky for years, writing about their philosophy, recommending their bottles to guests at the bar. But standing in front of the Taisho-era stone warehouse on a cold winter morning, I realised I had only understood it from the outside.
What I found inside changed that entirely.
The President Who Taught Himself CAD
Saburomaru Distillery was founded in 1952 as part of Wakatsuru Shuzo, a sake brewery with deep roots in Tonami, Toyama Prefecture. For decades it struggled — fires, critical reviews from industry experts, years when sales barely reached 140 bottles. By the 2000s, whisky production had stopped entirely.
The revival began when Takahiko Inagaki, the fifth-generation heir, returned from a career at a Tokyo IT company to face a near-impossible situation: a distillery with ageing equipment, a tiny market, and almost no momentum.
His response was not caution. It was invention.
In 2016, Inagaki launched a crowdfunding campaign — still a rarity in Japan at the time — to fund the distillery’s reconstruction. The campaign raised ¥38 million. Remarkably, 75% came from local contributors in Toyama, many of whom Inagaki had personally visited, door to door, helping older residents navigate the online platform with their own hands.
That is the kind of person he is.
The Sales Growth That Tells the Story
When I visited, 45,000 people had come to Saburomaru in the past year. Tour buses were parked outside at 10am on the day I arrived. A gift shop that once sold almost nothing was full of visitors. And whisky — which once represented less than 10% of the company’s revenue — now accounts for 80%.
These are not abstract numbers. They represent a complete transformation of a family business, built from near-zero through sheer inventiveness and an almost reckless refusal to accept the situation as it was.
Inagaki taught himself CAD software to draw his own distillery plans. He collaborated with a local construction supervisor — who took him under his wing — to learn technical drawing from scratch. And then, when faced with the impossibility of sourcing a new pot still (two to three year waiting lists, international queues during the global whisky boom), he decided to design and build one himself.
That pot still — ZEMON — is now one of the most talked-about pieces of equipment in Japanese whisky. But that story begins in the next chapter.
What stayed with me after meeting Inagaki was something harder to quantify than statistics. He spoke about the distillery with an enthusiasm that never seemed rehearsed. He was simultaneously the CEO of a growing business and someone who genuinely, obviously, viscerally loves whisky — the way a person loves something they chose freely, not something they inherited.
“It’s cool enough how I live, isn’t it?” he laughed at one point. And he was completely right.
Read the full Japanese column: little-happiness.jp/columns/saburomaru-distillery-report-1/
Also see the complete Saburomaru series overview: little-happiness.jp/columns/saburomaru-distillery-report/
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