ROGIN'S TAVERN

I've just arrived in Moriguchi, a suburb of Osaka, a few days after a visit to Bourbon Bar ANKI in Nagoya. My destination is Rogin's Tavern, arguably the most well known bourbon bar in Japan. Part of its notoriety is the product of its mention in an online Smithsonian Magazine article from 2014. The owner, Tatsumi Seiichiro, is something of a celebrity in the Japanese bar scene due to his decades of whiskey collecting and tremendous knowledge of vintage bourbon. The bar itself is easy to spot from the nearby Moriguchi train station - a large neon sign sits atop the building with a blue arrow clarifying the location of the bar below it.

Today is a Thursday, and I had arranged to meet Mr. Tatsumi in the early afternoon. The arrangement was loose enough, it turns out, that I'm not certain anyone is expecting me. Still light outside, I enter the bar's first floor, passing under a wood framed sign with “Est 1977” tucked away in the corner, reminding me that the bar and I are not all that different when it comes to age. Inside I find two gentlemen seated at the bar smoking cigars, backs turned towards me. There's a speakeasy-like quality to the place -- I feel as if I've interrupted two men amidst some sort of shady transaction. It's particularly quiet as well, an aspect which contributes to my growing sense that I may not be welcome.

The bartender watches me while working a towel slowly along the bar top, never quite stopping, and gives me a stoic glance with sufficient hesitation possibly intended to provide me the opportunity to leave without making things awkward. I pause, seconds pass. Eventually he gestures towards a seat as far away from the two seated gentlemen as possible. I spy a few rare bourbon bottles lining the bar I'm interested to try, though it will be hours before I understand that these are not the ones that matter. The mafia-esque vibe leaves me feeling uneasy and distracted. Shortly after I take my seat, the two gentlemen stop talking and one leans out from the bar and asks: “What is your name” with absolutely no element of ceremony. Upon providing it, he immediately gets up and walks briskly over to me, extending his hand to shake mine likely as a courtesy to my own cultural norm. Unsurprisingly, this is the owner of Rogin's Tavern, Tatsumi Seiichiro.

“What are you drinking” he states flatly, suggesting that I order something from the bartender. Scanning the shelves I spot a 25 year old bourbon called Rogin's Choice, a private single barrel bourbon he purchased for his bar from the Willett distillery decades ago. It's exceedingly rare, and the only bars on the planet likely to have it on the shelf are exclusively in Japan. Even if one was lucky enough to find it in a Japanese bar, the likelihood it will be open for customers is particularly small, as its rarity is widely known.

Mr. Tatsumi translates my request into a stream of incomprehensible Kansai dialect Japanese to the bartender, who dutifully locates the bottle, ritualistically wipes it clean with a towel, and pours it into a shot glass to the point where it spills over the top leaving the sides of the glass wet with alcohol. Mr. Tatsumi then gestures to me slightly and asks if we should head upstairs.

The second floor lies up an incredibly narrow set of stairs to the left of the front entrance, and is every bit as extensive as the bar on the first. A lone bartender waits patiently for his first customer, busying himself wiping down various pieces of glassware while jazz fills the air from a record player tucked in a corner. We sit down to a bar covered in clear plexiglass, revealing underneath a decades-old collection of vintage whiskey labels. Prohibition era bottles of bourbon line the walls and are tucked in nearly every corner. I imagine that the bar has changed little since it opened in 1977 aside from some subtle changes in the whiskies open for drinking. My drink from downstairs is placed in front of me, another glass is placed next to it, and is filled by the bartender with the same. As I consider mine, Mr. Tatsumi picks his up, takes a brief sniff, throws it back, and places the empty glass forcefully back on the plexiglass. He pauses for a few seconds staring at the empty glass. Then he states perfunctorily: “They don't make whiskey like this anymore.”

From my seat I immediately spot a bottle of Rathskeller Rye hiding on the shelves, a Rye whiskey rumored to be from barrels purchased from the old Bernheim distillery in Louisville. The rye whiskies from these aged barrels have produced some of the most coveted and arguably best rye whiskey ever produced. The 23 year old Rathskeller rye was bottled for the Seelbach hotel in Louisville and was apparently received as a gift from Mr. Tatsumi's friends at the Willett distillery. He remarks that the majority of his original six bottles were consumed over the years primarily by a single one of his regulars, and this is the last one in his inventory.

Over my pour of rye we get to talking about... well, whiskey. Mr. Tatsumi presents a point of contrast to other Japanese bar owners in that he rarely spends time behind the bar serving drinks. Rather, he sits with his customers, often with a cigar in hand, relighting it with a butane torch as needed. Various discussion points trigger him to request an obscure bottle or another from the bartender, who will disappear for a few minutes as it is located. It's in this way that the evening progresses with Mr. Tatsumi, talking about whiskey and him coming up with curated selections to try. Less and less is it an experience to try a collection of fantastic vintage bourbons and more a great sit down with a Japanese gentleman that knows whiskey.

He likely knows the answers to the obscure questions an American whiskey nerd amasses over the years. Others know as much, certainly, but few of them will sit and talk it through for a few hours over a drink.

He knows nearly everything about every bottle he owns: where he bought it, how many he found, what he paid. And he tells stories, many so fantastic they're almost impossible to believe. Tales of driving through the night to Kentucky as a young man, visiting every liquor store in his path. Tales of finding multiple cases of bourbon rarities in the back rooms of those stores, bought at a bulk discount and shipped home to Osaka on palettes by boat, a family connection making it possible. Ask him about any city in the United States and he'll begin listing the stores and the bottles he found at each one. Ask which city was the worst for finding rare whiskey and he states “Milwaukee” with just a tinge of irritation, quipping “they drink everything”.

The three Rogin's Choice barrels we drink that evening are the first he ever selected: the 25 year old poured downstairs, a 15 year old at 113.9 proof, and a 28 year old at 102.6. He has picked more from Willett since, but none of them are these. We meander through a wide range of vintage bourbons, Mr. Tatsumi acting as my guide. Each bottle comes with a story and a discussion segues into another bottle. He'll speak a few words to the bartender, who will sometimes disappear to another floor and return with an obscure bottle. I soon gather the impression that his rarest bottles are not lying in plain sight, hidden on different floors or within small cupboards. When asked about this technique, he states “I like to hide the rare bottles... it's my style.”

In the other bourbon bars I've visited in Japan, the owner tends to act as a guide rather than take orders. Keeping the best bottles out of view is how Mr. Tatsumi holds onto that role, even with a foreign visitor who arrives thinking he knows what he wants. You can ask for something specific, of course, and people do. I've just found the evening is better spent letting him take the lead.

As we continue to talk through the evening, Mr. Tatsumi begins asking the bartender to fetch various bottles, often requiring a trip to one of the other floors. Some are still sealed, which he remedies with a pocket knife.

One big difference between other Japanese bourbon bars and Rogin's Tavern is that while many of the existing Japanese bourbon bars are remnants of a time when American bourbon exports were arriving in the 1990s, Mr. Tatsumi has amassed a collection that transcends that.

The current building has been in Mr. Tatsumi's family for decades. It was his mother's before it was his, and by his telling it had a life in the neighborhood long before that. For a decade at least, the city has been trying to turn the area into a highway. It is hard to picture this place anywhere else: the plexiglass bar, the labels pressed underneath it, the bottles waiting in cupboards on three floors. Harder still to picture him rebuilding it somewhere new if the day ever comes.

Before we part ways for the evening, Mr. Tatsumi asks my plans for the next day in Osaka. Without a plan, he proposes picking me up in the morning at my hotel to spend the day driving around hunting for whiskey in the surrounding area. I obliged.

The road never came. In the ten years since, I've been back many times, including for the bar's 40th anniversary party, held at the Rihga Royal Hotel in Osaka. It drew guests from overseas and filled the room with aging bar owners from across Japan, a cast only Mr. Tatsumi could assemble in one place. He brought bottles from his own collection and poured them free until they were gone, vintage rarities that most collectors would have rationed.

At other anniversaries he has gone further. He keeps the samples drawn when he was selecting his earliest Willett Family Estate barrels, and he has opened the last of them for me. Among them was a 23 year old Pappy Van Winkle sample at 112 proof, where the bottled version is 95.6. It came from the Commonwealth Distilling Co., the Lawrenceburg operation Julian Van Winkle III ran himself until he moved to Buffalo Trace in 2002. Generosity is not a strong enough word for it. The rare bottles in his collection are nothing beside these: small snapshots of a whiskey that exists nowhere else, and never will again.

He is preparing for the 50th sometime in the coming year. The date isn't set yet. I intend to be there, to see the same old bar owners once again.