Japanese Fishing Tackle Built for One Job: Fighting Big Fish Standing Up

Who We Are

STANDING SOUL® is operated by Soul Shop Co., Ltd. (株式会社魂商店), founded on 5 October 2015 and based in Mishima, Shizuoka Prefecture. We develop, manufacture and sell rods for big game fishing.

Company

Soul Shop Co., Ltd.

Founded

5 October 2015

Address

253-4 Kawaragaya, Mishima, Shizuoka 411-0022, Japan

Japanese corporate number

2080101016877

Team Tachitsuri

The brand grew out of Team Tachitsuri, a fishing team registered with the Japan Game Fish Association (JGFA) as club number 837. Tachitsuri means fishing on your feet. The team fishes for very large fish standing up, one angler against one fish, without a fighting chair.

Kouji Yoshida, the team's founder and chairman, lives in Shizuoka and runs the team on a simple principle: fishing is play, so enjoy the fight. STANDING SOUL® exists to put the tackle the team relies on into the hands of anglers outside the team.

Yoshida also holds a JGFA all-tackle record, set with a grouper of 120 kg (265 lb).

Proven on Real Fish

The brand was raised on the team's own fishing rather than on a drawing board. Among the fish landed on STANDING SOUL® rods are a kingfish over 50 kg (110 lb) and a grouper in the 70 kg (154 lb) class, which is the range where a blank either keeps its backbone or does not.

The rods are built in two series. GACHINKO BATTLE (baitcasting) covers the live bait and bottom fishing side of the team's fishing and carries on up to bluefin tuna and marlin; those are the models we would recommend for heavy kingfish and grouper, and GACHINKO BATTLE SOUL 160 is the broadest of them. SPEED CHASE covers lure fishing for bluefin tuna and marlin, mainly on spinning tackle and with a baitcasting model as well, with SPEED CHASE ASSAULT FISHER 1530-50S as the model to look at for marlin.

Manato Mukaezato, a team member based on Yonaguni Island in Okinawa, holds Jr. world records for greater amberjack (kingfish) and for two species of grouper, all of them set while he was still in junior high school.

Kairi Nomura fishes the southern waters off Okinawa and takes big fish standing up on both lures and live bait.

Standing Hunts on Fishing Vision

Kouji Yoshida appears in Standing Hunts, a series on Fishing Vision, a Japanese channel devoted to fishing, where he is introduced as the leader of Team Tachitsuri. The premise of the series is the one our rods are built for: taking on giant fish with a manual reel and the rod in your hands, standing up.

Episodes 11 through 15 are on the program page, and further episodes are scheduled from August 2026. The series is in Japanese, but the fish and the fights need no translation: Standing Hunts on Fishing Vision.

Why a Japanese Fishing Rod

Our rods are designed and built in Japan by the same people who fish them. Nothing is specified in one country and made in another, so what a blank does under a real fish comes back to whoever decides how the next one is laid out, without passing through anyone in between.

That is also why the catalog is short. We would rather answer one fishery properly than list a model for every one of them.

If you want the construction details rather than the story — including what the blanks are made of — see how our rods are built.

Giving Back

We donate fresh food to children's cafeterias and to single-parent households in our area, and the team runs cleanups at the fishing grounds we use and in the surrounding community. Neither has anything to do with selling rods. Both are about keeping the water worth fishing for the anglers who come after us.

Talk to Us

If you are an angler with a question about which rod suits your fishery, or a shop or distributor interested in carrying the line, we would like to hear from you.

Ordering from outside Japan: please read International Orders first.