Restaurants: As I have told other inquirers, Japan probably has more restaurants per square mile than any place on earth, and most of them are mom-and-pop establishments. Most of them have either plastic models of the food in the display window or a picture menu posted outside, either one with prices. Since there is no tipping and the tax is folded into the stated price, you know in advance exactly how much you will have to pay.

Department store restaurant floors (every department store I've ever seen in 35 years has one) feature a lot of reasonably priced meals (under US$20), mostly in restaurants that specialize in one type of dish (e.g. kamameshi--a risotto-like dish with different possibilities for ingredients, mostly seafood, or okonomiyaki, which is too floury to be an omelet and too eggy to be a crepe, and is filled with your choice of ingredients and cooked on a grill in front of you) or one ethnic cuisine (there's always an Italian restaurant).

In my experience, izakaya do not have this tourist-friendly feature, only handwritten menus on the wall, and serve side dishes and snacks rather than meals. I suppose you could use the "I'll have what they're having" approach and make a complete meal of side dishes, especially since they include things like yakitori, tofu with bonito flakes, spinach with sesame seeds, and various kinds of seafood. However, the dish that looks like baked beans is actually natto, or fermented--I think that's a euphemism--soybeans that people either love or hate.

So rather than eat at places recommended in guidebooks, I just explore the neighborhood I'm in and settle on what looks appealing.