TWELV

How Tacamizuma Norihiro found a purpose in founding connections in Tokyo’s Porsche community and it’s avant-garde drinks scene.

For Tacamizuma Norihiro, community is everything. The founder of Tokyo’s most avant-garde sake bar and a pillar of the city’s Porsche community, ‘Taca’ has found a purpose in founding connections and focusing on originality through respectfully merging old and new worlds. “Although I have no memory of it, the first toy that my grandmother bought for me was a Porsche mini car,” he explains. “I was apparently very excited, and I played with it for a very, very long time.”

Years later, and you could say nothing has really changed, with the exception of scale. When the moment to turn a childhood dream into reality finally arrived, Taca was overcome. “I was emotional, I couldn’t sleep.” That first car was a Boxster, nearly two decades ago now. From there, a steady stream of Porsches have found their way into his garage; “Once you go down that path you become so obsessed.”

We first met Taca in Tokyo in 2022, three years after the addition of his first air-cooled example, a paint-to-sample, Mizwa-imported G Model. “I wasn’t sure the listing was real,” Taca says. Everything about the spec was almost too good to believe - an understated Satin Black Metallic hue, with modest fabric seats; “And the 9J Fuchs wheels gave it a really super look.” Half a decade since he worked to secure this special car, it reminds the one he daily drives in Tokyo, and it’s often seen under the streetlights outside of Twelv, the cutting-edge sake bar he founded and curates.

“Japanese culture has a deep respect for the maintenance and preservation of something,” he says of his cherished Mizwa-imported G Model, “so when a car was first imported to Japan it almost certainly went to a home where it was going to be cared for.”

When the moment to turn a childhood dream into reality finally arrived, Taca was overcome. “I was emotional, I couldn’t sleep.”

That mentality of craft and preservation of originality is carried through everything in his life, and you have to look no further than Twelv to see it in full force. Tokyo’s first sake bar focusing on biodynamic and organic expressions, his invite-only bar is on the avant-garde of the drinks scene in the city and has become a gathering point for those who share his passion. “The ability to use sake, a traditional Japanese craft, as a tool to create that community is a blessing...this to me is my irreplaceable purpose in life.”

“Japanese culture has a deep respect for the maintenance and preservation of something,” he says of his cherished Mizwa-imported G Model

We caught up with Taca in Tokyo to explore even more in our latest film, alongside the legendary Motofumi ‘Poggy’ Kogi, and FDMTL Founder Gaku Tsuyoshi. Watch it below, or on the Type 7 YouTube channel.

Special thanks to Kitasando Garage and FlipFlip Coffee Supply for hosting us in Kitasando, Tokyo.