The Scope Room
Where every project starts: a whiteboard, two chairs, and…
Documentation Desk
Bilingual specs written here, in Japanese and English,…
The Server Wall
A small test rack we use to replicate client environments…
Reading Corner
A shelf of IPA guidelines, industry reports, and postwar…
The Call Booth
Soundproofed for vendor calls and board presentations. No…
Yanagase Window
Third-floor view of the street where the firm started,…
2026-06-03
Hiroshi Tanaka founded Knot Lab Mesh in Gifu City in 2018, after twelve years working as a systems architect at a mid-size logistics company in Nagoya. The name came from a specific frustration: watching well-intentioned IT projects fail not because the technology was wrong, but because the connections between systems, teams, and decisions were tangled in ways nobody had mapped. The first office was a single room above a stationery shop on Yanagase Street. The first client was a textile wholesaler in Ogaki who needed to retire a custom inventory system that had been running on a single ageing server since 2001.
The early years were slow. Hiroshi spent most of 2018 and 2019 doing assessments that clients filed away and never acted on. The turning point came in the spring of 2020, when a food-processing company in Seki City called with a genuine emergency: their production scheduling system had failed two weeks before a major delivery deadline. Knot Lab Mesh spent three weeks on-site, rebuilt the scheduling logic in a maintainable format, and got the delivery out on time. That project led to four referrals in the following six months, and the firm has grown steadily from that point. By 2022, the team had grown to seven consultants and moved to a proper office in the Yanagase district.
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“We had been putting off a server migration for four years because every vendor we spoke to made it sound impossibly complicated. Knot Lab Mesh gave us a plain-language plan and stayed with us through the whole process. It took eleven weeks and came in under the quoted fee.”
— Kenji Murakami, Managing Director, Murakami Textile Co., Ogaki
Selected client feedback. Individual experiences vary and may not be representative.
Today, Knot Lab Mesh works with manufacturers, distributors, and professional services firms across Gifu, Aichi, and Mie prefectures. The firm has completed 34 engagements since 2018, ranging from single-week assessments to eighteen-month migration projects. Hiroshi still leads every client relationship personally for the first month of any engagement. The team is small by design: seven consultants, no subcontractors, and a deliberate policy of taking on no more than four active projects at a time. If we cannot give a project the attention it needs, we say so at the proposal stage.
If we cannot give a project the attention it needs, we say so at the proposal stage."Hiroshi Tanaka spent twelve years as a systems architect at a logistics company in Nagoya before founding Knot Lab Mesh in Gifu City in 2018. He holds a degree in information engineering from Nagoya University and has worked on infrastructure projects across manufacturing, food processing, and wholesale distribution. He founded the firm after noticing that most IT project failures he witnessed were organisational rather than technical. Outside of work, he is a regular at the Gifu City Library's monthly reading group, where the selection runs toward postwar Japanese fiction. He reads every client proposal himself before it goes out."
Yes. Most of our clients are in Gifu, Aichi, and Mie, but we have taken on remote engagements for companies in other prefectures when the project is a good fit. For remote work, we typically schedule two or three on-site visits during the engagement rather than working entirely at a distance.
It depends on the scope. A Digital Infrastructure Assessment usually runs four to six weeks. A full legacy system migration can take anywhere from four months to over a year, depending on the complexity of the existing systems. We give a realistic timeline estimate at the proposal stage and do not compress it to win the work.
Yes, and this is actually a common situation for our clients. Several of the manufacturers we work with have one or two people handling IT alongside other responsibilities. We adjust our communication style and documentation accordingly, and our Internal IT Team Development service is specifically designed for organisations building that function from scratch.
We renegotiate openly. If something emerges during the project that was not in the original scope document, we write a change request, agree on the additional fee and timeline, and both parties sign before we proceed. We do not absorb scope creep silently and then present a larger invoice at the end.
Fill in the form below and we will respond within two business days. We will let you know honestly whether we think we are the right fit for your situation.