WA-SHU Japanese Sake: Japanese Sake Culture Flourishes in Taiwan. - Part 1 -

Special Report: 10 Years of the Taiwan Bar Scene] Our third guest for this special report is Tomoaki Inaba, who runs WA-SHU Wasake in Taipei, and Takafumi Makita, a Japanese bartender living in Taiwan who honed his skills under Mr. Inaba and opened Lab at the end of 2020. In the first part, we interviewed Mr. Inaba, who has seen the Taiwanese bar scene from the inside for the past 10 years since opening "WA-SHU Wasake" in 2013!

writer：Drink Planet　撮影：Wakako Gomi

A pioneer in the Taipei bar scene.

The area in the center of Taipei between Chung Hsiao Fuxing MRT station and Kuo-Father Memorial Hall MRT station is known as the "Eastern District," an area known for its fashion trends.

The popular bar "To Infinity & Beyond", which we introduced last month, is located in this area.

Many of Taipei's popular cocktail bars, including those ranked in Asia's 50 Best Bars, are concentrated around this area.

WA-SHU WA-SHU, owned and bartended by Japanese citizen Tomoaki Inaba, opened in 2013 and moved to its current location in the "East District" in 2015.

At the time, there were hardly any cocktail bars in the area.

There weren't many bars serving proper cocktails in the whole of Taipei, let alone in this neighborhood," he said. It's really only in the last few years. Bars started opening all over the place at ....... There is a bar next to ours, another one next to it, and three more bars across the street. The East Ward is now a bar-dense area (laughs).

Inaba-san, who was one of the first to open a bar in Dong-gu and has trained many Taiwanese bartenders, can be said to have led the Taiwanese bar scene for the past 10 years.

Most of the guests are Taiwanese, and they are especially interested in the cocktails that Inaba creates.