In Ginza we found that a shop’s own page was the thing most worth trusting. In Shinjuku, one company contradicted itself across two of its own pages. In Shibuya, shops had handed the job of describing themselves to a landlord, a listing system and a messaging app. In Roppongi, the pages said things and never said when. In Nihonbashi, the building published a second version and the two did not agree. Every one of those questions could be asked in Japanese. Asakusa asks the sixth, and it is the first that depends on who is reading: not what is published, but what form it is published in.
This is the district that receives more foreign visitors than any other in Tokyo, and the five shops below know it. Four of the five have arranged something in English. What none of them has arranged is a way for that English to carry the one piece of information a visitor actually needs on the day — which days this month the shop is shut, and what the cheapest thing on the menu costs. In every case the answer exists. It is on the website. It is simply in a form — a query string, an imperial era name, a page with no way out, a nine-year-old feed, a photograph — that the reader cannot open. We have arranged five counters by how much of what they publish is legible, from least to most, and the last one is the counter-example.
Asakusa Sushiken — five characters of English
Sushiken is a minute from the Tsukuba Express exit, seats sixty, and publishes more hard information than anything else in this article. Seven pages, all in Japanese: an address, a telephone number, two sets of opening hours split between weekdays and Sundays, a closing day, an average spend at lunch and at dinner, a named lunch set at ¥3,000, a seat count, a private room threshold, five card brands and QR payment. Almost every field a visitor could want is filled in. The site has no language switch and no English page.
It does have English, though, and it is worth looking at where. Near the foot of the page sit two booking links. One is labelled, in Japanese, ‘book here’. The other is labelled, in Japanese, ‘for bookings from overseas’. They point at the same address. The only difference between the two is the twelve characters appended to the end of the second one, of which five are the language code itself. That is the shop’s entire English provision: a parameter.
We are not going to call that a failure, because it is not one — the booking system has a language setting and the shop has switched it on, which is more than many do. The failure is structural and it is one line higher up. The link that carries the English is written in Japanese. A reader who cannot read the label cannot identify it as the way in, and there is nothing else on the page — no flag, no two-letter code, no roman lettering — to mark it. The shop has done the work and then filed it behind the one door its intended reader cannot see.
- Where. 2-11-4 Asakusa, Taito-ku. One minute from exit A1 of Asakusa station on the Tsukuba Express.
- Booking. By telephone on 03-5246-6547, or online. Two booking links, identical but for a language parameter; both labelled in Japanese.
- Hours. 12:00–15:00 (last orders 14:30) and 17:00–22:00 (last orders 21:00). On Sundays and public holidays the evening ends at 21:30.
- Closed. Wednesdays. For the New Year the site says only that you should check.
- Price. Average spend ¥1,540 at lunch, ¥3,300 at dinner. The most popular lunch set, thirteen pieces and a roll, is ¥3,000.
- Seats. Sixty, with a private room from seven people. Japanese only; no English page and no language switch.
Sushi Homare — the closing time, in an era name
Homare is a minute from the same station in the other direction, on the ground floor of an office building in Nishi-Asakusa, and it runs five pages in Japanese with a Google translate widget embedded in them. That widget is worth naming precisely: it is a machine translation of the shop’s Japanese, not something the shop has written, and we have not treated its output as published English. What the shop has written itself is a block of opening hours that appears, identically, on all five pages.
The block has three lines. The first gives the hours as 17:00 to midnight, last orders at 23:00. The second says the shop is closed from 31 December to 7 January — a real date range, which is more than Sushiken manages. The third says that from the fourth year of Reiwa the closing time changes to 23:00, with last orders at 22:00. All three lines are current, in the sense that all three are on the page today. Two of them give different closing times.
Which one applies depends entirely on whether the fourth year of Reiwa has arrived, and that is a question a reader can only answer if they can convert the era. Reiwa began on 1 May 2019, so its fourth year is 2022, which means the change happened four years before this article and the shop closes at 23:00. It is a single word, and everything downstream of it — whether you can still be seated at half past eleven — turns on it. Era names are the last thing to survive translation on a Japanese page, because they read as ordinary words rather than as numbers, and a widget will happily render this one as ‘Reiwa 4’ and leave the arithmetic to you.
- Where. Ito Building 102, 2-27-1 Nishi-Asakusa, Taito-ku. One minute from Asakusa station on the Tsukuba Express.
- Booking. By telephone on 03-6802-7235. There is no online booking.
- Hours. From 17:00. The page gives both midnight with last orders at 23:00, and — from the fourth year of Reiwa, which is 2022 — 23:00 with last orders at 22:00.
- Closed. Wednesdays, and 31 December to 7 January.
- Price. ¥8,000 before tax for either omakase course; ¥12,000 before tax for the longer one, which must be booked ahead. Tax-inclusive figures are not given.
- Seats. Not published. Japanese only, with a Google translate widget.
Sushihatsu Souhonten — one page in English, and no way onward
Sushihatsu has been on the Sushiya-dori arcade since 1910 and reopened after a renovation in December 2022. It keeps a Japanese site of six or seven pages and, hanging off it, a single page called english.html. That page is good. It carries the concept text, two paragraphs on tradition and technique, all three course prices, and a full shop-information table: name, telephone, address, three stations with walking times, opening hours, closing days, nine card brands, electronic money. The prices match the Japanese course page exactly — ¥6,600, ¥8,800 and ¥9,900, all with tax — and the founding year, which the Japanese gives as the forty-third year of Meiji, is rendered as 1910 rather than left for the reader to convert. Someone did this properly.
Then look at the top of it. The navigation bar on the English page is in Japanese — seven items, none of them translated — and every link in it points at a Japanese page. Home, the concept page, the course page, the seating page, the shop information anchor, the news anchor, the map. There is no second English page to move to, because there is no second English page. And the Japanese pages carry no link back: nothing in the site’s own navigation tells a reader that english.html exists. It is a complete document with no entrance and no exit.
One consequence is worth spelling out, because it is the only thing in this section a Japanese reader also cannot resolve. The published hours open at noon. The English page’s own opening line says the shop is known for course meals at lunch as well as dinner. The three published courses carry no lunch or dinner marking, and the cheapest is ¥6,600. So the page tells you the shop is open at midday and tells you nothing about what midday costs. Whatever the answer is, it is not on the site.
- Where. 1-12-10 Asakusa, Taito-ku, on the Sushiya-dori arcade. Two minutes from exit A2 of Asakusa station on the Tsukuba Express.
- Booking. By telephone on 03-3842-0777, or through an online booking system linked from the site.
- Hours. 12:00–14:30 and 17:00–21:00. The English page gives the same.
- Closed. Irregular. No calendar is published in either language.
- Price. ¥6,600, ¥8,800 and ¥9,900 with tax, the last by reservation only. No price is published for lunch specifically.
- Seats. Ten at the counter, plus tables and a private room, neither of which is given a number. One English page, which nothing links to and which links to nothing in English.
Bentenyama Miyako Sushi — two complete sites, and one missing line
Bentenyama Miyako Sushi has been in Asakusa since 1866 and has two websites, one in Japanese and one in English, built page for page: about, history, what Edomae sushi is, the fifth-generation owner, his favourite work, menu, location, blog, contact. Nothing is untranslated. The hours agree to the minute in both, including the different Sunday and holiday hours. The address, the telephone number, the three-minute walk from exit 7 and the thirty-minute lateness rule all agree. Both languages even carry the same internal contradiction in the closing-days box, where an older line saying Mondays and the third Sunday sits above a newer one saying that from 2024 it is Mondays and the first and third Sundays. That is a fault, but it is an evenly distributed one, and the English reader is no worse off than the Japanese.
The menu is where the two part company. The Japanese page lists twelve prices; the English lists ten. Every price that appears on both agrees exactly, down to the yen, which is why the difference is so hard to notice: nothing on the English page looks wrong. What is missing is ¥13,860, and ¥8,800 — and ¥8,800 is the cheapest course the shop offers. Read in English, this counter starts at ¥11,660. Read in Japanese, it starts nearly three thousand yen lower. The English menu is not a mistranslation of the Japanese menu; it is an older edition of it, faithfully rendered.
The blog compounds it. On the Japanese side the sidebar runs April, May, June and July of this year — the shop posts its closing days monthly, which is the only way to know which Sundays are the first and third. On the English side the newest item is from June 2017; we dated it from the weekdays it lists, which fall exactly on 2017, and the image path in the post agrees. Three of the four items in that English list still carry Japanese titles. So a visitor who follows the English site’s own logic — the closing days are posted, go and read them — arrives at a set of dates from nine years ago that look perfectly serviceable. And the current post, the July one, has no text in it at all. The dates are a photograph, uploaded from a phone, with an empty alt attribute: invisible to a browser’s translation, to a screen reader and to search.
- Where. 2-1-16 Asakusa, Taito-ku. Three minutes from exit 7 of Asakusa station on the Ginza line.
- Booking. By telephone on 03-3844-0034. A booking is treated as cancelled if the party is more than thirty minutes late.
- Hours. 12:00–14:30 (last orders 14:00) and 17:00–21:00 (last orders 20:00); Sundays and holidays 12:00–18:00 (last orders 17:00). Identical in both languages.
- Closed. Mondays and the first and third Sundays, per the newer of the two lines both languages carry. Which dates that means each month is posted in Japanese only, as an image.
- Price. Courses from ¥8,800 to ¥18,260 with tax; bowls from ¥3,300. The English menu omits the ¥8,800 course and the ¥13,860 one, and agrees on every other figure.
- Seats. Not published in either language. Full English site; English blog last updated June 2017.
Both menus look right. Every price on both agrees. The only difference is that the cheapest line is missing from one of them.
Edomae Mimatsu Sushi — written in English, and one door short
Mimatsu opened in 1958 and is the counter-example. Its English is not a translation; it is writing. The recommendations come with pronunciation — kohada as kō-hah-dah, anago as ah-nah-gō, hikari-mono as hee-kah-ree mō-nō — and the directions from Kaminarimon are set out in six numbered steps, left along the arcade, right at the first light, twenty metres, left at the first corner, fifty metres, on your left. No machine produces that. Five Japanese pages, five English pages, a switch in both directions. Hours, closing days, payment methods, five stations with walking times, eight counter seats and eight at tables: every field agrees across the two languages. Even the absence agrees — neither menu carries a single price, in either language.
The closing days are Wednesdays and Thursdays, unless a Wednesday or Thursday is a public holiday, in which case the shop opens. That rule cannot be resolved into dates without a calendar, and the shop says so. Both pages carry the same sentence in their respective languages: the days will be announced at the start of each month, in the shop’s What’s New. It is a clear, honest instruction, and it is given to the English reader in English.
The English site has no What’s New. There is no such item in its navigation and no such section on its front page. On the Japanese front page there is one, and inside it are two embedded feeds — a Facebook page and a live Twitter timeline — which is where the monthly announcement actually goes. The English front page carries neither. What it carries is a single static follow badge, an image, whose alt text is the one piece of Japanese left anywhere on the English site: a sentence, in Japanese, inviting you to follow the account. The site sends its English reader to a page it does not have, and the only surviving trace of the route is written in the language that reader came here to avoid needing.
- Where. 1-6-5 Asakusa, Taito-ku. Five minutes from Asakusa station on the Ginza line or the Tsukuba Express.
- Booking. By telephone on 03-3841-5717. Whole-shop and party bookings taken; take-away boxes for the Asakusa Public Hall and the Sumida river cruises.
- Hours. Weekdays 17:00–22:00 (last orders 21:30); weekends and holidays 12:00–15:00 (last orders 14:30) and 17:00–21:00 (last orders 20:30).
- Closed. Wednesdays and Thursdays, except when either is a public holiday. Both languages say the monthly dates are posted in What’s New; the English site has no What’s New.
- Price. Not published, in either language.
- Seats. Eight at the counter and eight at tables. Complete English site, written rather than translated.
What the five have in common
Not one of these five is hiding anything, and four of the five have spent real effort on being understood. Sushiken switched on a language setting. Homare pays for a translation widget. Sushihatsu wrote a proper English page and converted its own founding year out of the Meiji era to do it. Bentenyama built a second site of nine pages. Mimatsu wrote its English by hand, pronunciation guides and all. The gap in every case falls at exactly the same place: on the piece of information that changes. Fixed facts — address, telephone, seat counts, station exits, standing hours — translate once and stay translated. What moves each month, and what a visitor most needs on the day they are standing in Asakusa, is the part that lives in a photograph, an embedded timeline, a query parameter, an era name, or a page that no link reaches.
That is not a language problem. It is a maintenance problem that happens to surface as a language problem, because the moving parts are the ones nobody has time to publish twice. The shop that writes its English by hand and the shop that writes none of it end up leaving the reader in the same position on the only question that has a deadline. Which is why the practical advice below is not about translation at all.
Reading an Asakusa page in about a minute
- Count the pages before you read any of them. If the English side has fewer items in its navigation than the Japanese, the missing ones are usually the news, the blog or the announcements — which is where the closing days are.
- Look for an era name and convert it on the spot. Reiwa year N is 2018 plus N; Heisei year N is 1988 plus N. A single unconverted era word can be the difference between a shop that closes at eleven and one that closes at midnight.
- Compare the two menus by counting lines, not by reading them. Prices that appear on both will usually agree; the risk is a course that appears on only one. Check the cheapest line in particular, since an older edition tends to be missing the newest entry-level course.
- Treat an image as an empty space. If this month’s closing days are a photograph of a handwritten notice, no translation tool and no search will reach them. Assume you do not have that information, and telephone or ask your hotel rather than guessing.
- When the language switch takes you to a page that will not take you anywhere else, go back and use the Japanese pages with a browser translation. A dead-end English page is usually accurate; it is just alone. The Japanese pages are the ones being kept up to date.
Asakusa is the easiest district in Tokyo in which to eat well without a reservation, and none of the above should stop anyone walking into any of these five. It is a description of a specific and rather ordinary failure: not of translation, which several of these shops have done properly and at their own expense, but of the assumption that a translation is a thing you finish. The fixed facts here were translated once and are still correct years later. The one line that changes every month has never made it across, in any of the five, in any form a reader can open — and it is the only line anybody needed on the day.
If you want to book one of these
Several of the counters described above answer the telephone only in Japanese, and a few of them take bookings by no other route. AutoReserve is a Japanese reservation service with an English interface, and it states that it will place the call on a diner’s behalf where a restaurant takes reservations by telephone alone. We have not tested it against every restaurant on this page, and a listing there is not a guarantee of a seat — the doors described above are the doors either way.
Frequently asked questions
If a shop has an English page, can I rely on it?
For fixed facts, yes — addresses, telephone numbers, station exits, seat counts and standing opening hours are translated once and rarely go stale, and in all five shops here they agree exactly with the Japanese. For anything that changes, no. Prices and menus can be an older edition rendered faithfully, which is the hardest kind of error to spot because nothing on the page looks wrong: at Bentenyama Miyako Sushi every price that appears in both languages agrees, and the two the English omits include the cheapest course in the shop. Closing days are worse still, because they are usually posted monthly on a page the English side does not have.
Where do Japanese restaurant sites actually put this month’s closing days?
In a news or blog section, in an embedded social feed, or in a photograph of a handwritten notice — and often in only one of those. All three are hard to reach in a second language. A blog can be years out of date on the English side while current on the Japanese; an embedded Twitter or Facebook feed is frequently placed on the Japanese front page only; and a photograph of a notice is invisible to browser translation, to search and to screen readers regardless of language. If a shop tells you its closing days are announced monthly, expect to need the Japanese page.
What does an era name like Reiwa 4 mean on an opening-hours page?
Reiwa began on 1 May 2019, so Reiwa year N is 2018 plus N: Reiwa 4 is 2022. Heisei year N is 1988 plus N. The reason it matters is that shops often announce a change by adding a line rather than editing the old one, so a page can carry both the old and the new hours at once, distinguished only by an era date. Sushi Homare’s hours block does exactly this, and whether the shop closes at midnight or at 23:00 depends on converting a single word.
Is a booking link with a language parameter worth using?
Yes, if you can find it. Several Japanese booking systems serve the same page in English when a language code is added to the URL, and shops do switch it on. The problem is that the link carrying it is often labelled in Japanese — at Asakusa Sushiken, the two booking links are identical but for the parameter, and the one meant for overseas guests is labelled in Japanese. If a site has two booking buttons that look the same, hover over both and compare the addresses; the longer one is usually yours.
Why not just use a listing or review site, which will be in English?
Because a listing site is not a party to the business. It did not set the price, it does not decide the closing days, and it has no obligation to update either. Everything in this article comes from pages the shops publish themselves, which is the standard we hold to across this series. Where a shop publishes nothing on a point — and three of these five publish no seat count, and two publish no prices at all — we have left the gap open rather than fill it from somewhere with no accountability for being wrong.
