Bar Commune is one of those, “if you know, you know” type of spots. You normally hear about it through word of mouth, a friend telling you to check it out or some stranger on a night-out sharing its location in a whisper, claiming you probably won’t find it but if you do, well, you’ve lucked out. When you visit you’ll realise right away what makes it so special. You’ll get that feeling of having stumbled into the diamond in the rough of Japan Town. There, sitting under the night sky on the couches of its small, outdoor balcony, you may ask yourself who had the idea to create a place this cool? It was after a few visits that I found out that Tomoki, who was normally behind the bar, played a large part. With his hair always glistening with gel, he usually sported an MF DOOM t-shirt, jeans, and a pair of sneakers, all in all reminding me of those hip-hop heads I’d often see back home in Tokyo. When we met one afternoon to talk about his journey, he looked no different. We sat at a cafe, one Japanese guy and one English-Japanese guy speaking Japanese in Saigon. To any of the Vietnamese people around us, it must’ve been a peculiar sight.
Tomoki was born in Kobe, the capital of the Hyōgo prefecture which is located in the southern part of Japan’s main island. Growing up he spent his weekends partaking in what many Japanese would consider their national pastime: baseball. Though he harbored dreams of playing on the big stage one day, it didn’t take long for Tomoki to realise that he just didn’t have what it takes. This wasn’t a heartbreaking realisation, more just a matter of fact. Looking for something that he could do instead, he started getting into the service industry out of a love of meeting and interacting with people. He was working at hotels for a while until a connection from his baseball past reached out with an offer for work in the melonpan business (a Japanese sweet bun resembling a melon). The company was planning on expanding to Vietnam and needed someone to go there on their behalf. Tomoki, twenty-three years old at the time and clueless about Vietnam, figured what the hell—what else was he going to do?
He arrived in Saigon in October of 2017. Immediately, he was hooked. The food, the people, the culture. After all, raised in a city like Kobe which is clean, metropolitan, and orderly like most big Japanese cities, Saigon was a shock to the system. He loved the innate rawness of the place and the fact that though the country was developing fast, it still retained a sense of itself. Though his work with the melonpan business ended the following June, Tomoki didn’t want to leave. In need of a way to stay in Vietnam, he leveraged his history working in hotels as a restaurant bartender and came up with the idea of opening a cocktail bar. Partnering with a mutual friend who already ran a Chinese restaurant and sports bar in Japan Town, the two opened up “Ore no Cocktail” (My Cocktail). Despite his experience working in the service industry back in Kobe, Tomoki describes this period as a crash-course in all things bar-related. Back when he was working in hotels as a restaurant bartender he was simply receiving orders and making drinks. At Ore no Cocktail his role went beyond the craft of bartending and encompassed the numerous roles that are needed for running a business, all the while delving deeper into the ethos of what it means to be a bartender. For the young Tomoki, it was a period of transformation, his mind quite literally opening to the possibilities of what one could do in that line of work. Besides being a period of exponential growth, it was, equally, a period of non-stop partying.
Working in a bar is something of a blessing and a curse. As a teenager, the idea always appealed to me. Once I started working in bars in my early twenties, I discovered how fun the work could really be. However, there was a catch. Bartending can be long and gruelling, and when the bar’s busy you experience something of a hyper-focus where the world condenses to nothing more than the next drink, the heightened rush of making the next cocktail until—when your shift’s over—you almost collapse with a fatigue like you’ve just gotten off a six-hour rollercoaster. After working as a bartender, I realised that the work was work like most work is. This is something Tomoki also came to terms with during his time at Ore no Cocktail. The bar became something of a meeting point for a lot of young Vietnamese and Japanese people, and Tomoki got sucked into a part of bartending work that often gets overlooked: drinking. Drinking while you’re at work might sound like a dream to some but when your job revolves around alcohol, it doesn’t take long for drinking to feel a little old. This meant that his time at Ore no Cocktail was also a period of learning how to balance the two, which, given that whenever I see him at Bar Commune he’s helpful, alert, and attentive to his customers’ needs (while always being up for doing a shot with you), I believe he’s figured it out.
Since his move to Saigon, Tomoki learned a lot about the service industry, going so far as to co-found Ore no Cocktail. According to him, Japan Town back in 2017 was a completely different place from what it is now, mostly made up of residences, as well as some girl bars and massage parlors. Rather than the more international crowd who now frequent the place, back then the demographic was mostly Vietnamese, Japanese, and Korean. From the day Ore no Cocktail opened, Tomoki started meeting a bunch of people, both in the service industry and outside of it. Among those names was a Japanese guy from Okinawa called Charlie.
Charlie owned a karaoke bar in Japan Town. He often came to hang out at Ore no Cocktail and that was how Tomoki got to know him. It wasn’t long before they’d visit each other’s bars whenever they were free, and this was how Tomoki learned that Charlie was something of an unofficial ring leader in the Japanese bar scene of Saigon. When Tomoki’s partner at Ore no Cocktail left the country at the start of the Covid pandemic—leaving him with thoughts that he should do the same—it was Charlie who convinced Tomoki otherwise. Thus, he decided to ride it out. However, with Ore no Cocktail now closed, Tomoki still needed a job. Charlie and Tomoki had plans of opening up their own spot together and when Powers, a mainstay in the Japanese-owned nightlife scene of Saigon shut down, the two decided they had the perfect location for their own spot.
Bar Commune opened in October of 2021. Their vision was to provide an authentic clubbing experience in Japan Town, given that though the area was rife with a variety of nightlife establishments, it was always missing a place people could go to club. This was why when Bar Commune first opened, it had two floors. The third floor functioned as a space for the DJ and dance floor, while the fourth floor was for the outdoor seating area and indoor bar—basically, how it is now. With a desire to put on as much music as possible, from the get-go Tomoki operated with the mindset that if you were playing at Commune, you were getting paid. Despite such a willingness to pay musicians for their time and effort, they had a hard time actually amassing a roster of DJs to play in the third floor club. This meant apart from the weekends, the space was usually empty. Besides that, it wasn’t long before Tomoki noticed another issue with the clubbing area. As the bar was upstairs, there was a lot of traffic between the two floors and eventually, people opted to stay upstairs which meant that after a few songs, DJs would be playing to deserted rooms. Despite such challenges, the first few years were a blast. They hosted a number of collaborations, from a ramen pop-up called Choi Oi Noodle to their Taco Rice (an Okinawa-American fusion dish) nights, both fond memories that still make Tomoki laugh. At the time he recalls how the bulk of their customers were Japanese but thanks to word-of-mouth and the fact that they always paid their DJs, it wasn’t long before more foreigners were showing up.
In June of 2023, Bar Commune’s third floor shut down. On top of the aforementioned reasons, it was getting expensive to keep running the place and so they decided to move the DJs upstairs and focus on the fourth floor. Their efforts have paid off and nowadays, Bar Commune is fully booked with DJs, making it, as was their original plan, a haven for music lovers in Saigon. Aside from that, a willingness to collaborate with other brands and business has resulted in MixTape’s craft beers being stocked in their fridge as well as events with local sneaker brand MIV, in which famed Vietnamese rapper Andree Right Hand made an appearance. More so than any of this however, Tomoki is proud of the team at Commune. One bartender, Kim Ngân, has been there since the beginning and with such loyal, competent members of the crew, Tomoki’s thankful to be in a position where he can start thinking about what’s next.
It’s funny how whenever I meet another Japanese person in Saigon and we get to talking, at some point during our conversation one of us will ask that big, looming question that’s always hidden in the backs of our minds: When, if ever, will we go back to Japan? I’ve thought about this myself many times and the verdict has always been the same: I don’t miss Tokyo right now but I will, at some point, go back. When I brought this up with Tomoki, he shared a surprisingly different sentiment. While he misses his family and friends and he visits them on biannual trips back to Kobe, the reality is, he doesn’t see himself being anywhere besides Saigon in the near future. He’s built a life here, after all. To go from knowing nothing about Vietnam to now running a place that’s very much ingrained in Saigon’s music and nightlife scene, he’s come a long way from that kid who—upon landing—had the sole mission of selling melonpan. So what’s next? Tomoki’s got his sights set on cities like Hanoi and Da Nang so who knows, it might not be long before you’ve got Bar Communes all across the country. If you do, don’t hesitate to stop by. Tomoki will be manning the bar like he always is, happy to talk, happy to answer any questions and hey, why not? Order him a shot and I'm sure he’ll be happy to toast to another night in Saigon with you.
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