Five counters that work in English,
and the fish the English never names

The question arrives in a predictable shape. Is there an English menu. Do they speak English. Will I be able to order. Every guide to Tokyo sushi answers it the same way, with a list of restaurants marked as friendly, and every one of those lists leaves the reader with the same idea — that somewhere behind the door there is a document, and that the document is the thing standing between you and dinner.

We spent a day reading what five Tokyo counters actually publish, in both languages, side by side. The finding was not the one we went looking for. On the menu with the most complete English of the five — every course itemised, every price stated, tax and service included in the figure — the fish is not named. Not once, in eighteen lines.

Then we opened the Japanese version of the same page. The fish is not named there either.

That is the piece of information this article exists to hand over. The English menu at a Tokyo sushi counter is usually a faithful translation of a Japanese menu that also declines to tell you what you are eating, because at a counter the species is not a written fact. It is decided in the morning at the market and delivered by voice, once, as the piece is set down in front of you. Translation is not what is standing between you and the fish. Speech is.

That does not make translation harmless. We found one course pair where the English collapses a ¥4,100 difference into two identical paragraphs, a discount page that exists only on the Japanese side of a restaurant’s own site, and a vegetarian dish whose English drops the single word a vegetarian needs. Those are real costs and we have set out each one below with the page it came from.

Hinokizaka, and the four thousand one hundred yen that is only in the Japanese

Hinokizaka is the Japanese restaurant of The Ritz-Carlton, Tokyo, on the top floors of Tokyo Midtown in Akasaka. It is one name over several counters: kaiseki, sushi, tempura and teppanyaki each have their own, and the menu page carries a tab for each. The sushi tab is the one that concerns us.

The English menu is, on any reasonable measure, excellent. Four courses, two at lunch and two at dinner. Every course broken into its parts — appetiser, side, sushi, soup, dessert — with the contents of each part listed. A price against each course, and a line under the heading that reads, in full: all prices include applicable tax and service charges. There is no arithmetic left for you to do, which is rarer in Tokyo than it should be.

• Lunch — Hama, ¥12,500. Nagi, ¥16,600.
• Dinner — Sazanami, ¥23,000. Kyo, ¥32,000.
• The restaurant serves lunch 11:30–16:00, last order 14:30, and dinner 17:30–22:30, last order 21:00.
• Booking runs through an English reservation page; takeout is a separate listing on the same system.

Now put the two lunch courses next to each other in English. Hama, at ¥12,500, lists its sushi as: white fish, lean tuna; silver skinned fish, shellfish, salmon roe; semi fatty tuna, sweet shrimp, conger eel; chef’s recommendation; Japanese omelet, sushi roll. Nagi, at ¥16,600, lists its sushi as: white fish, lean tuna; silver skinned fish, shellfish, salmon roe; semi fatty tuna, sweet shrimp, conger eel; chef’s recommendation; Japanese omelet, sushi roll.

The two paragraphs are identical. Word for word, line for line. The appetiser is the same, the side dish is the same, the soup is the same, the dessert is the same. An English reader looking at that page has been given a complete, well-made document that offers no reason whatsoever to pay the extra ¥4,100.

The Japanese page for the same two courses is not identical. It differs in exactly three places, and every one of them is a piece of seafood.

1. Nagi opens with ika, squid, which Hama does not have at all. That is a whole additional piece.
2. Where Hama serves a small bowl of ikura, salmon roe, Nagi serves uni and ikura together — sea urchin has been added to the bowl.
3. Where Hama serves ama-ebi, the sweet raw shrimp, Nagi serves kuruma-ebi, the cooked tiger prawn that is one of the fixed landmarks of an Edomae counter.

So the extra ¥4,100 buys squid, sea urchin, and a change of shrimp. That is a perfectly reasonable thing to buy. It is also entirely invisible in English, because all three differences live in words the English menu renders by category. Ama-ebi and kuruma-ebi both become sweet shrimp. Uni in the bowl disappears into salmon roe. Squid simply is not there.

We want to be precise about the size of this. It is not a mistranslation and nobody is being misled about what they will be served. Both courses are described accurately at the level the English chooses to work at. But a reader deciding between two prices is doing the one task the page cannot help with, and that reader is the person the English page exists for.

The dinner courses do not have this problem. Sazanami at ¥23,000 opens with squid in both languages, and Kyo at ¥32,000 names sea urchin in both. Whatever happened at lunch is a gap in one place, not a policy.

What hikarimono is doing on both menus

Which brings us to the line we assumed would be the scandal. On the English page, the third item in every Hinokizaka sushi course is silver skinned fish. It is a category, not a fish. Kohada, aji, sayori, iwashi and sanma all live inside it, and they are not remotely the same experience.

We opened the Japanese page expecting to find a name. What is written there is hikarimono. Shiny things. The category, in Japanese, exactly as broad as the English.

The same is true of the two lines around it. Shiromi, white fish, is any of a dozen. Kai, shellfish, is any of six. Akami and toro tell you which part of the tuna and nothing about which tuna. And o-susume isshu, rendered as chef’s recommendation, is a written admission that one piece of the course is not decided at the time of printing.

This is worth sitting with, because it reframes the whole question. A Tokyo sushi menu is not a list of dishes in the way a European menu is a list of dishes. It is the shape of a meal: how many pieces, in what order, with what around them. The contents are a function of what came off the boat, and the restaurant will not print a promise it cannot keep in September about a fish that will be gone by October.

So a perfect English menu, translated by a native speaker with a fisheries dictionary, would still not tell you that tonight’s hikarimono is kohada cured for four hours rather than aji dressed with ginger. The document was never the channel. The channel is the two seconds in which the chef names the piece.

That is the real question to ask a restaurant, and it is a different question from the one everyone asks. Not is there an English menu. Will anyone say the fish out loud in a language I have.

Roku Roku, where the counter says less than the table

Roku Roku is on the sixth floor of the Grand Hyatt Tokyo, in Roppongi, ten minutes on foot from Hinokizaka and a completely different piece of publishing. Its English menu page does not display the menu. It links to a PDF, and the interesting thing is the address of that file.

Every other document on that English page — the privacy notice, the house policies — sits at a path containing the language code. The menu PDFs do not. The English page and the Japanese page point at the same files. The hotel is perfectly capable of splitting the two, does so for its legal documents, and has decided not to for its food.

When you open one of those files you can see why. The menus are bilingual on the page: Japanese down one side, English down the other, line for line, price shared between them. Nothing has been dropped, because nothing was ever separated. It is a single document that two audiences read from different sides.

The weekday lunch is the clearest thing on the site. A nigiri business lunch, served 11:30 to 14:30 on weekdays: a daily appetiser, eight pieces of nigiri and a roll, miso soup and a Japanese sweet, at ¥4,290. Bara chirashi, described in English as vinegared rice with sashimi, at the same ¥4,290. And an assorted sushi set at ¥6,490 — ten pieces and a roll, which the English itemises as two kinds of tuna, salmon roe, blue-skin fish and shrimp.

Blue-skin fish. That is hikarimono again, the same word Hinokizaka renders as silver skinned fish, translated differently in a building one subway stop away. Neither is wrong. Neither is a name. If you learn one Japanese word before you sit down at a Tokyo counter, that is a strong candidate for the word.

The dinner menu is where Roku Roku becomes genuinely unusual, and it is a distinction we have not seen made this plainly anywhere else. The courses are split into two groups by where you will be sitting, and the two groups are written to completely different standards.

• The counter courses — Icho at ¥19,580 and Hinoki at ¥23,980, both with a last order of 20:30 — describe their sushi as nigiri sushi, ten pieces. That is the entire description. No fish is named in either language.
• The table courses — Sazanami at ¥12,320, Shiosai at ¥16,060 and Roku Roku at ¥20,350 — name everything. Saltwort with young sardine and sesame. Grilled miso-preserved rockfish. Simmered turban shell. Cutlassfish with yuzu. Egg custard with grilled pike conger.
• The menu states the split in one line of English: the above courses are available for the sushi counter, and the above courses are available for table seats.

The cheaper seat comes with the fuller description. That inversion is not a mistake and it is not about language at all. A table course is plated in the kitchen against a fixed written specification, so it can be printed. A counter course is what the chef bought this morning, so it cannot be. The same logic that empties out Hinokizaka’s sushi lines empties out Roku Roku’s counter courses, and it applies identically to the Japanese reader.

One detail inside the bilingual PDF is worth flagging, because it shows what human translation does under load. The heading yakimono, the grilled course, appears in the Shiosai menu as grilled and in the Roku Roku menu as simmered. Same Japanese word, two English answers, one document. Nobody was careless; a long menu was translated dish by dish and one heading drifted.

The footnotes are bilingual too, and they include a sentence most restaurants would not bother to translate: the rice served in this restaurant is all from Yamagata prefecture. There is also a note that ingredients change with what is received, an invitation to raise allergies, and a line stating that the hotel holds ISO 22000 food safety certification.

Sushi Shin by Miyakawa, the most fluent English and the least food

Thirty-eight floors above Nihonbashi, in the Mandarin Oriental, Sushi Shin by Miyakawa has the best-written English of the five by a distance. It is also, by a distance, the page that tells you least about eating.

What it tells you about is the room. A sushi counter cut from a single piece of hinoki cypress said to be more than three hundred and fifty years old. Wooden screens in kumiko, the joinery technique in which small pieces of wood are fitted without nails, made by a craftsman working in a pattern derived from Edo komon textile design. Walls by a plasterer who works in earth. The restaurant opened in 2016 as the first Tokyo counter from a chef whose original restaurant in Hokkaido held three Michelin stars, and it names him.

There is no price on the page. There is no course outline, no piece count, no list of anything. Not in English.

We opened the Japanese page to see what was being withheld, and the answer is nothing. The Japanese page has no price and no menu either. The two versions carry the same information, and the information is architecture. Whatever this restaurant is doing, it is doing it to everybody equally, which is more than can be said for some sites with far more English on them.

The one difference we could find between the two versions is a citation. Japanese specifies the edition — the special Hokkaido volume of the Michelin guide, 2017. English says Michelin three-star and stops. That is the whole delta.

The booking arrangement is the part worth knowing. Lunch runs from noon to two, dinner from six to ten. There is a Tokyo telephone number and a reservations email address. And the button labelled Book Table, on both the English and the Japanese page, opens WhatsApp to a Japanese mobile number. A hotel counter of this class routing its bookings through a consumer messaging app is a sharper signal about who it expects to hear from than any amount of translated prose.

Itamae Sushi, where the English shares the line with the Japanese

Itamae Sushi runs ten restaurants across Tokyo — Shinjuku, Akasaka, the Ginza Corridor, Atago, Shimbashi, Aqua City Odaiba, Ginza Six, and separate branches under the Hanare name in Akasaka and Ginza. The site offers four languages. It is the only one of the five where the English is not a translation of the Japanese site so much as a resident of it.

Open the Japanese home page — not the English one — and the dishes are already bilingual, line by line, with tax-inclusive prices. Amakusa pike conger with plum soy sauce, ¥1,280. Steamed egg custard with Shizuoka sakura shrimp, ¥680. Oita grunt fish, lightly blanched, ¥398. The Itamae roll with shrimp tempura, ¥1,280.

Read those again against the Hinokizaka lines. Here the fish is named, and so is the prefecture it came from. Amakusa. Shizuoka. Oita. This is the opposite pole of the same industry: a menu that can print species because it prints a list of dishes rather than the shape of a course.

The omakase course is ¥8,500 including tax, and its English description contains something its Japanese description does not. English: seasonal dishes, seasonal egg pudding, nine pieces of nigiri, a wild bluefin tuna roll, and soup. Japanese: appetisers, seasonal chawanmushi, nine pieces of nigiri and a tekka-maki, soup. Tekka-maki is a tuna roll. The English writer expanded it to wild bluefin tuna — more information, not less, for the reader who does not already know what tekka means.

The course sheets are published in four languages, and so is the vegetarian plate at ¥3,480 including tax. On that plate the traffic runs the other way. The Japanese offers a choice of yasai-dashi udon or a vegetable roll. The English offers vegetable udon or a veggie roll. The word that fell out is dashi — the stock. For a vegetarian, and even more for a vegan, that is not a decorative adjective. It is the single word the dish turns on, and it is missing from precisely the menu written for people who cannot ask about it in Japanese.

What an English site quietly leaves out

This is the failure mode nobody checks for, because it leaves no trace on the page you are reading. A translated site is usually not a copy of the original. It is a subset, and the subset is chosen by whoever had time.

We counted the links on Itamae’s two home pages. The Japanese one carries seventy-five links to forty-five distinct destinations. The English one carries forty-nine links to thirty. Fifteen sections of the site have no English entrance at all: the news archive, the press coverage, the delivery and takeout pages with their order sheets, and a video library about the tuna the group buys.

And one more, which is the one with a price attached. There is a page for the group’s conveyor-belt restaurant in Aqua City Odaiba offering ten per cent off the bill for customers who book in advance, Monday to Friday, running since February 2026. Booking is by web or telephone. The page is in Japanese only and nothing on the English home page leads to it.

Nobody hid that. A discount campaign was written in Japanese in February and the English navigation was not rebuilt around it. But the effect on a visitor is exact: the customer least able to read the site is the one paying full price, at a restaurant whose whole English proposition is that it is easy for foreigners.

It takes about a minute to check for this yourself, and it is a useful minute to spend on a restaurant’s website. Open the Japanese home page next to the English one and compare the navigation. If the Japanese menu bar has more items, read the extra ones through a browser translation. That is where the delivery menus, the seasonal courses and the discounts live.

Kura Sushi, where the English is generated and the language is designed out

Kura Sushi is a national conveyor-belt chain at a hundred and fifteen yen a plate, and it belongs in this article for a reason that has nothing to do with the sushi. It is the clearest example in Japan of a restaurant solving the language problem by removing the conversation.

The site offers five languages. Follow the English one and something becomes obvious quickly: every link out of the English home page — reservations, restaurant finder, menu, quality, the flagship stores, the first-time guide — goes to a translation service host, which fetches the Japanese page and renders it in English on request. The English site is not a set of English pages. It is the Japanese site, translated live, each time somebody asks for it.

That is a legitimate engineering decision for a chain with hundreds of branches and a menu that changes weekly, and it has the honest advantage that the English can never fall out of date the way Itamae’s navigation did. Its cost is the one you would predict: nothing on the English side can be written for an English reader, because nothing on the English side is written at all.

What the company does write about, at length and in its own words, is how to run a restaurant in which no language is required. The Japanese press releases for the group’s flagship branches are specific about it, and the specifics are more useful than any claim about English support.

• The ordering touch panel at the Asakusa flagship supports four languages. The release does not say which four.
• Staff who can serve customers in a foreign language wear a badge, so you can see from across the room who they are rather than finding out by trying.
• The branch introduced a handheld voice translator covering, per the release, more than a hundred languages.
• Seating is self-service: you check in on a panel at the door and the system assigns you a table according to what is free.
• The bill is calculated automatically by cameras above each seat reading codes printed on the plates, so there is no counting and no ordering conversation at the end.

One of the newer branches states the goal in a single sentence, which we paraphrase: service is provided from entry to exit without the customer facing a member of staff at all. Read that as a language feature and it is the most thorough answer to the problem in this article. Read it as a dining feature and it is the opposite of a sushi counter, where the entire product is a person telling you what you are about to eat.

The domestic flagship branches are Asakusa, Dotonbori, Harajuku, Oshiage Station, Namba Parks South and Ginza — that is, the six places in Japan where visitors are thickest. The design is deliberate and it is aimed squarely at you.

The word price does not mean the same thing at each door

Four of the five publish numbers, and the numbers are constructed differently at each one. This is a common way a Tokyo bill surprises a visitor, and it has nothing to do with anybody being cheated.

• Hinokizaka states that all prices include applicable tax and service charges. The figure on the menu is the figure on the bill.
• Roku Roku states that prices include tax and are subject to a fifteen per cent service charge. The ¥19,580 counter course arrives as roughly ¥22,500.
• Itamae Sushi prints incl. tax against individual dishes and against the ¥8,500 omakase, with no service charge stated.
• Kura Sushi quotes ¥115 a plate as a tax-included price, in a format where the plate count is the bill.
• Sushi Shin by Miyakawa publishes no price in either language, so there is nothing to construct.

The gap between the first two is the one to internalise. Two hotel sushi counters, ten minutes apart, both writing careful English, and the word price carries a fifteen per cent difference in meaning between them. Neither hid it. Both printed it in a footnote, in English, where footnotes go.

Which is the practical lesson. At this level of restaurant the surprises are almost never in the prose. They are in the small line under the last course, and reading it takes five seconds.

Reading a restaurant’s English in two minutes

Everything above compresses into a short sequence you can run on any Japanese restaurant site before you decide anything.

1. Find the language switch and note how it moves. If the address changes to a different host rather than a different folder, the English is being generated on demand and no one has written for you.
2. Compare the two navigation bars. Extra items on the Japanese side are the sections you are not being shown, and campaigns and delivery menus live there.
3. Read the footnote under the prices before the prices. Tax included, service charge added, or both, decides what the number means.
4. On a course menu, check whether the fish is named. If it is not named in Japanese either, that is normal, and it tells you the meal will be narrated rather than listed.
5. Look at how you are asked to book. A messaging app, an English reservation platform or a phone number are three different statements about who the restaurant expects.
6. If any of it matters to you medically — an allergy, a diet — do not rely on the translated menu. Write to the restaurant before the day and get the answer in writing.

That last one is not a general precaution. It is the direct lesson of a vegetarian plate whose English lost the word dashi.

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.

• Sushi restaurants in Tokyo on AutoReserve

Frequently asked questions

Do Tokyo sushi restaurants have English menus?

Many do, and the better ones are carefully made. What surprises visitors is that a complete English course menu often still does not name the fish — it lists categories such as white fish, shellfish and silver skinned fish. That is not a translation failure. The Japanese menu at the same restaurant usually lists the same categories, because at a counter the species is chosen the morning of service and told to you out loud.

What does hikarimono mean on a sushi menu?

It is the group of small silver-skinned fish — kohada, aji, sayori, iwashi, sanma and others — usually cured with salt and vinegar. English menus render it as silver skinned fish or blue-skin fish; we found both wordings at two Tokyo hotel counters ten minutes apart. Since the category covers very different fish, it is the one word worth learning to ask about.

Is the English version of a Japanese restaurant website the same as the Japanese one?

Often not. On one Tokyo group’s site we counted forty-five destinations in the Japanese navigation and thirty in the English, with delivery menus, news and a ten per cent advance-booking discount reachable only in Japanese. Before you decide anything, open both home pages side by side and compare the menu bars; the extra Japanese entries are where campaigns and seasonal offers live.

Does a price on a Tokyo restaurant menu include tax and service?

It depends on the restaurant and it is always stated, usually in small type under the courses. One hotel counter we read includes tax and service in the printed figure; another states that prices include tax and are then subject to a fifteen per cent service charge. Read that line before you compare two restaurants, because otherwise you are comparing two different numbers.

How can I tell whether staff will actually speak English?

A website cannot tell you, and no page we read makes a claim about who will be working on a given night. What a site can tell you is how it expects to be contacted — an English booking platform, a messaging app or a Japanese telephone number are three different answers. If something matters medically, such as an allergy or a vegetarian diet, write ahead and get the answer in writing rather than relying on a translated menu.