The Pig & Whistle English Pub in Osaka Closes its Doors for the Last Time!
July 16, 2008
A Japanese National Treasure Vanishes Forever!
After almost 30 years in business the famed Pig and Whistle chain of English Pubs will close its doors for the last time on 18th July 2008.
Mori San, the owner of the Pig & Whistle group, embarked on this adventurous concept some 30 years ago when there were far less foreigners in Japan than there are today.
Almost every foreigner (known as gaijin by the Japanese - meaning “alien” no less!) who has lived in, or visited Japan would have sooner or later paid a visit to the Pig & Whistle in one of its former three branches - Umeda, Shinsaibashi and Kyoto.
It came as great sadness to the gaijin community five years ago when the Umeda Pig closed its doors. Mori San is far too much a gentleman to discuss the reasons but convention wisdom has it that the landlords became too greedy and as anyone who has run a pub knows the margins are slim. Is this the case with the tremendously popular Shinsaibashi Pig?
The gaijin community of Osaka received the news with shock and horror. One such patron and long time resident of Osaka is exhorting fellow Whistlers to attend the last supper at the Shinsaibashi Pig on Mido Suji Dori on closing night. Absent aficionados have asked to be remembered and pass on their best wishes to Mori San.
The Pig & Whistle group of English Pubs was not just a place to have a cold beer on a humid Osaka evening, it was one of the few places in Japan where Japanese students of the English language (Eigo Bandits) could practice their new found language; a place where East met West; a place where love was found and sometimes lost; and a place where important information was traded such as the next “trivia night” venue (usually the Pig or its close rival Murphy’s Irish Pub also in Shinsaibashi.
From all of us Mori San, thank you for the memories. You will live forever in our hearts and mind.
The dart board of the Umeda Pig (pictured) was the centre of my attention for many hours a decade or so ago. I had some cracking games in there, forgetting the day job. The old beer token system was like a second currency among gaijin in Osaka. Asuka can still be found in her own bar, the Red Lion. I think a Guinness in the Umeda Pig and the old Shin-Pig was 850 yen in 1997/98 and I don’t think it has gone up. A beer in London costs more than a beer in Osaka these days, but I bet the operating costs didn’t stay the same. You don’t get the variety of life in the average bar that there was in the Pig, but then that could be a good thing!
I remember Jim Teare as the scalawag who ran off with my darts AND wife. I paid good money for those darts.
So the Pig is about to close.
I must have been the first ever customer to walk through the Piggery doors.
There was a party to welcome new teachers to the company I used to work for and the secretary breathed that there was this new pub in Shinsaibashi and it was ENGLISH!!!.
“The only English pub in Osaka!”
As luck would have it it was the opening night of the Pig.
The location was different to the one now.
This is going back about thirty years,and the area was swarming with kimono clad Mama Sans,young hostesses dressed in fur coats,hosts strutting in and out of their clubs arm in arm with old women, and menacing looking guys in sunglasses ( a yakuza group was headquartered just around the corner as I was later to find out to my cost,but that is another story).
Now,this area is run down and seedy,but in the late seventies it was a bit of a glittering boomtown.
I remember Mori San welcoming me in.His hair was black in those days.
As pubs go,it seemed OK,but nothing special.There were better places to go.
Discos,for example,where you could get a free gaijin membership deluxe pass for nothing,and eat and drink for free and score at will.The bosses reckoned that by having gaijin in the discos,more Japanese would want to go and meet them and bring in the filthy lucre and so it proved to be true.
Discos came and went,but the Pig survived.
It started to boom when Mori San hired my Swedish friend Anders,later to become the right hand man of the boss of the late unlamented Nova.
Pretty soon it became the in-place for the new gaijin in town and Scottish barmen and Austrian and French all worked behind the bar at the Pig.
Needless to say lots of hanky panky went on at the top of the stairs.It was a lot of fun to be a young,English buck gaijin in those days.
Since then ,there has been murders in the Pig (a deranged looney Frenchman stabbed three people to death ). I remember on that night,a guy stopped me on the street and asked me if I knew any good pubs.I directed him to the Pig,and I always wondered what his reaction must have been.People have met their future wives there,had illicit affairs there and lots more.
I scampered to Rio for a year and upon my return found not one Pig,but three.
Business must have been good.
It continued right up to a few years ago,and then competition,high rent and the economy started to turn the screws.Gaijins left in droves..the Umeda Pig closed it’s doors and I got married and left Japan.Yet the news that the final Pig has gone to the great sty in the sky was really sad news.
Richard
Richard Downing
…and a fine set of darts they are too…
It’s really unfortunate, I hope Jomu finds a new location and reopens. Always a fun place to get a beer, and the first bar I ever went to in Japan, my first night there. I only went in the Shinsaibashi one (saw the Kyoto one from outside, never managed to go in), but went numerous times, great times…
Sad day indeed. Although you have the luxury of choice in clubs, bars, izakayas and what-not, there is virtually nothing to replace P & W around the Namba / Shinsaibashi area. The easy access, lively atmosphere, great music and affordable beer made the place the destination of choice either for a late friday beer after a nibble at a restaurant or a final call for a shopping spree. I truly am sad that my favourite spot just to kick back and have a beer vanished to thin air.
So what I want to know is, who will take the torch from P & W? There are is Murphy’s, number of Hub’s and some gaijin-bars like Zerro, but non of those have the same laidback atmosphere to P & W.