Originally Posted by
agp423
Also, how do you know what places are restaurants? I am looking for hole-in-wall izakaya and/or sushi places, but from what I've seen online, a lot of Japanese food places are very incognito, and since I don't read Japanese, there's no way for me to tell except to peek in every door I walk past.
Missed your food question the first time around. If you can't tell that a restaurant is a restaurant without reading the kanji, then it's probably expensive. Inexpensive to moderate restaurants have either display windows with plastic models of their menu items or a picture menu posted outside. Department stores, shopping arcades, and large office buildings have restaurant floors, where you can find restaurants specializing in single dishes or families of dishes (different varieties of noodles, for example) or ethnic cuisines (Italian, Indian, Chinese).
Izakaya usually have a red lantern hanging outside, but they rarely have menus in English, just signs on the wall in Japanese.
You will not believe how many restaurants there are in large Japanese cities.