Osaka's Rogin

In 1977, Seiichiro Tatsumi was urged to sell the family building on the old road through Moriguchi. He said no and opened Rogin's Tavern instead. At first, a coffee and jazz cafe. Over the years it grew to fill the building, floor by floor, and the coffee gave way to bourbon, a taste he'd carried since his first proper whisky: a glass of I.W. Harper in a hotel cellar bar in Osaka.

In 1984 he left the bar in his wife's hands for three weeks and flew to Kentucky alone. He drove the blue highways at night, because liquor store signs are easier to spot after dark. He found stores where time had stopped and bought what nobody over there wanted anymore, a hundred bottles a trip, until the shelves back home held thousands. Eventually the world caught up, and bottles he once poured for a modest price began selling at auction for small fortunes.

Now Rogin's is approaching its 50th year. The neighborhood around it is slated for redevelopment, the old bottles are slowly evaporating in the dark, and every pour leaves one less. Tatsumi wants to keep it all exactly as it is. His method hasn't changed in fifty years. When something breaks, you fix it.

Rogin's turns fifty in 2027, and the film arrives with it. The city has its eye on the old road, the bottles are slowly evaporating in the dark, and the man who built the collection is still the only one who knows where every one of them came from.

A distiller at Willett mentioned to me, almost offhand, the best whiskey he'd ever tasted. A 1960s Colonel E.H. Taylor, in a small bar in Osaka. I couldn't let it go. When I finally found Rogin's, I understood why.

This September I went back with cameras and a crew and stayed until the bar started to feel like mine too. The film ends on the Rogin's sign. 呂仁 By then, you understand what it means.