Our Story
Who we are
HIDARI is a small shop in Gifu, Japan, run by a married couple. Gifu sits in the middle of the country, best known overseas for Shirakawa-go — a UNESCO village set among mountains and rivers.
We're Aya and Shingo Kato. Aya is left-handed; Shingo is right-handed. Aya runs the shop day to day, handling everything to do with the products. Shingo takes care of the business side and the creative work — photography, copywriting, and the like. Our office and small physical shop are in Kakamigahara, Gifu, open about four days a month.
The beginning
Since childhood, Aya had been looking for left-handed tools she actually wanted to use — stationery, kitchen tools, scissors, planners, folding fans.
She couldn't find them.
It wasn't that they didn't exist. But most of what was out there was sold as novelty. The function was correct, but the design or quality rarely held up. Some shops treated left-handedness as a gimmick.
What Aya wanted wasn't novelty. Just good tools — ordinary in every way, except that they happened to fit a left hand. No shop like that existed anywhere she looked.
It wasn't an easy start
Shingo went independent as a copywriter and launched LANCH Inc. in 2015. About two years later, the two of us started talking about starting something new together.
One day, Shingo asked, "Is there a business you'd like to try?" Aya's answer was: a shop for left-handed tools.
Shingo said no the first time. The market was too small to be viable — a perfectly reasonable judgment.
But Aya couldn't let it go. With a nudge from a friend, we talked again, and decided to go ahead. The agreement was simple: this probably wouldn't grow into a big business, but it was worth doing.
On August 13, 2018 — International Left-Handers Day — we opened an online shop called Hidarikiki no Dōguten, which means "The Left-Handed Tool Store."
The first month's revenue was almost nothing.
Still, it felt like the right thing to be doing.
Being in Gifu
The shop grew slowly. Messages began arriving from customers all over Japan.
In 2023, we opened a small physical shop in Kakamigahara called Tokidoki Store — tokidoki meaning "sometimes." We can't open every day, so we open on a handful of days each month. Some customers travel from Tokyo, or from as far as Okinawa, by shinkansen or plane, staying overnight to visit.
Being in Gifu turned out to matter more than we expected.
The neighboring city of Seki is one of Japan's most respected centers of knife and blade making. Once we had a physical presence here, connections with local makers formed naturally. At first, we were only buying from them. Over time, we began making things together. Our left-handed kitchen shears that come apart for cleaning, for example, were developed with Suncraft — a cutlery maker based in Seki.
The shop carries tools we've selected from makers across Japan, along with a small number of originals we've made ourselves. We don't hide which is which. Every product says clearly who made it, and where.
The name HIDARI
HIDARI means "left" in Japanese.
It started as the name we gave to the originals we made under our Japanese shop, Hidarikiki no Dōguten. When we began selling overseas, the Japanese shop name was too long and too unfamiliar for an English-speaking audience. Rather than invent something new, we took a name we already cared about and made it the name of the shop itself.
HIDARI is both a brand and a shop now. Short, and close to its Japanese sound. Left-handedness is universal, and we'd been thinking for a long time about reaching beyond Japan.
How we think about it
Being left-handed isn't unusual. It's a physical trait — like being tall, or having curly hair.
So HIDARI doesn't treat left-handedness as something rare, and we don't frame our tools around inconvenience. We just carry good tools that happen to fit a left hand.
The quiet pleasure of choosing a tool, and of using one that works — that's what we'd like to sit at the center of what you find here.
From here
HIDARI is still small. We send out tools we've gathered from across Japan, and the originals we've made, one order at a time, from Gifu.
If something here turns out to be the right fit for your left hand, we'd be glad.
— Aya & Shingo Kato
HIDARI
