Hey everyone, my friends and I (22M) were walking on the street looking for yakitori in Ginza/Yurakucho area. We were looking for a Torikizoku which is a yakitori chain in Japan when an “employee” from a different restaurant started asking us to go into his place advertising it with an English menu and cheap food/drinks. This was a big warning sign that we missed. It is apparently illegal for any restaurant worker to go out on the street and try to bring you in, so avoid places that do that. Initially we just kept walking but after checking the line at Torikizoku, we went back on the street. My friends wanted to check out the place the guy was advertising, so against our better judgement we headed up.
Normally, on the street, there are signs advertising the name and floor of a restaurant. There were none. We had to take an elevator up with the guy from the street and the entire time we didn’t see any directory talking about the name of it. We got to the 5th floor and the restaurant was completely empty at 7:00pm on a Sunday, another warning sign. We then sat down, and I was immediately sketched out.
I asked my friend who spoke Japanese to ask our server for the name of the restaurant and she didn’t know it. She got really quiet and walked away to grab a fake business card with the name on it. The menus also didn’t have a name, which was bizarre. We searched up the name on the business card: HAMANOKA, Ginza. There were no reviews for the place and it wasn’t on Google or Apple Maps when we checked where we were, another warning sign.
The waitress kept offering us Nomihodai, all you can drink, for really cheap and even though we said no, she came back 6 times and kept asking us if we wanted beer or cheap drinks, another warning sign. I had read about places in Kabukicho that had scammed tourists in the exact same way so I had a suspicion. I got up and told my friends I was leaving, we still had ordered nothing, and they agreed to leave. The waitress printed us a bill for $22 CAD and the charge on the bill was for “appetizers”, that we hadn’t ordered. That was another warning sign, and apparently it’s illegal to charge customers for things they never ordered. We ended up paying and got out of there before we could lose any more money.
My friend is Japanese Canadian so he called his Grandma, who lives in the countryside, and asked her all about it afterwards. She detailed how there was a real problem with places inviting in and scamming tourists. She mentioned that it was illegal to invite people off the street and that the government had been cracking down on places like that. She also mentioned that they would charge hidden fees for things like ordering liquor that are 10x the price of the drinks. And if you don’t agree to pay, they don’t let you leave unless you call the police. We were lucky that they only manage to gouge us for ¥2200 but it couldn’t have been worse. I put the name of the place in the title so that anyone searching up the name of this place might hopefully stumble into this Reddit post, which would have saved us last night. The names of these places are always changing, so just remember if it seems to good to be true then it probably is.
by Silent-Ask935