I was wandering around Shimbashi yesterday evening and saw a a small restaurant that looked like it served good Yakitori. I slid the door aside and saw there was one or two seats left at the bar and a free table. Every other seat was filled with salarymen. When I pointed to a chair I wanted to take the waiter came over and told me �sorry this restaurant doesn�t serve first time customers�.

Can the Japan regulars let me know if this is a common policy? How does the restaurant attract new patrons as many of the salarymen looked on their last legs? Was this just a restaurant not wanting to serve foreigners?

I haven�t experienced this in 15 years living in China so it came as a bit of a shock to me.

It's not unusual* in Japan. Honestly, I can't blame places that do this based on behaviors I've seen from foreigners (Asian and Western) in restaurants. There are a lot of places I don't enter unless I'm with a local.

*Plenty of places DON'T do this, and many will openly court foreigners by offering English language menus. It really depends on the neighborhood.

They attract new customers because the old ones bring in new ones, but more than likely you were descriminated as a foreigner which is rare, but does happen. It is more likely to happen at a small privately owned restaurant. They might have gotten burned once by a foreigner, so now they take it out on all foreigners. Oh well, their loss.

Not sure about yakitori restaurants but I've heard this is increasingly the case with some high-end restaurants. If you want to get in, you have to go with a regular patron.

Another reason I've heard is that the staff doesn't feel like they can adequately provide service to foreigners and would rather avoid any issues caused by miscommunication.

I wonder if they will be told to open up a little more with the Olympics coming......

The problem there is some would lose their regulars if they opened up to foreigners. It's probably not worth it for them in the long run.

Perhaps it's one of those things about Japanese society that you have to accept the bad to get the benefit of the good.

Perhaps because they have these kinds of policies and beliefs, they're able to offer a very high degree of service and dedication to quality, so that you enjoy it when you do get to go with a regular patron.

Maybe if they did have to take everyone who appears at their door, they would need to dumb down or decrease the quality of what they do because random strangers might judge them in the wrong way or post negative reviews and they'd have to modify their food/service to suit those incentives. And you wouldn't be coming across a small izakaya that you really want to go try, because it no longer exists.

Maybe, I don't know. But I've learned that Japanese culture has a lot of these subtle societal byproducts, where the good things you love about the country kind of need other less good things in order to be possible. You get the benefit of seeing the some of the best of it, without having to deal with the downsides of living in that society in the long term. But also, you don't get some of the benefits that also accrue only from living there your whole life.

interesting how people will defend racism or xenophobia in japan, but try refusing service in a western country and you will hear them singing a different tune.

Try walking into a club in the Western world where you're not a member and see how many drinks you get served at their bar. Same concept, really. And if being introduced by a current "member" is all it takes to get served, that's a pretty low entrance fee. I am a regular at a number of such establishments in Japan, and it doesn't matter what color or nationality you are. They just want to make sure you're somebody they know is willing to serve as a reference for you.

The fact that they are restaurants and are, at least physically, "open" to people walking in from the street, doesn't mean that it's "open" to anybody to just doing so. This is a disconnect with Western mores, where a private club or restaurant would be not as "obvious" from the outside, and would signal its "privateness" more directly.

Here's an example for you, of Annabel's in London: https://membership.annabels.co.uk/ Youse gets your "letter of support" from a member, you're welcome to join. Otherwise, sod off.

it isnt club membership they want, it is japanese membership...

It's exceedingly rare for a bar or restaurant to discriminate against foreigners. If anything, I think there's a huge amount of discrimination (and tolerance) in favor of foreigners.

Generally speaking, the discrimination isn't against foreigners, it's against people who don't speak Japanese, because the staff can't communicate with them.

Maybe English speakers who waltz into a shop and just point to a chair rather than asking politely (in Japanese) if they have any free seats should check their sense of entitlement.

Cause China isn't Japan. I haven't seen Chinese restaurants turning away customers. Japanese places routinely do it, even though they seem "empty".
It seems they aren't always about more customers/more money.

If it is a small Yakitori restaurant called Umemitsu (梅美津) in Shinbashi, it is actually patrons/reservation only.

There are quite a few patrons only restaurants in Tokyo.

And there is a word for it in Japanese " 一見さんお断り" which literally means "does not serve first time customers".
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That phrase is often used by relatively small, old Japanese style looking restaurants run by one chef or two.
Those places usually accept patrons or someone with patrons.

For those restaurants, it does not matter if you are Japanese or not.
And usually you don't see any signs stating it is patrons only even in Japanese.
So it is hard to tell which one is patron only or not unless you can read Japanese and search online info.
And if Japanese try to go those places not knowing it, they will just say "does not serve first time customers" in Japanese.