I know this is going to be a controversial post because of how much people love Tokyo, but this wouldn’t feel like an honest post if we didn’t mention the fact that we ended up getting scammed in Tokyo during our 23-hour layover in Japan.
It wasn’t the biggest scam in the world, only $10 USD, but it was very obvious that we were being targeted for being foreign and taken advantage of. For me, the dollar amount is wholly irrelevant.
I’ll gladly pay for a $100 meal, but somebody trying to trick me out of even just a few dollars simply being from a different country is disgusting and makes me never want to go back.
What makes it even worse was that this place didn’t need to try and scam me to get my money. We were more than willing to hang out there for a few hours and run up a bill having sushi and yakitori.
Watch Out For Scams in Shinjuku District
We had just spent the night wandering around the various districts and side alleys of Shinjuku and Shibuya and were feeling pretty hungry around 4 or 5 am. I can’t remember the time exactly, but it was about 30 minutes before the subway started back up and there were drunk people all over the place.
Anyway, we found this really cool looking izakaya called Toritoshi and sat down to have some food. Our server came up to us and asked us if we wanted to order anything, and we put in a few rounds of sushi and two waters.
A few minutes passed by, and a different server demanded that we order two expensive alcoholic drinks. When we told her no and that we didn’t want them, she told us we had to leave and pointed to a sign in Japanese.
That part was fine. We can’t read Japanese, so we just took her word, apologized, and asked for our food to go. This is where things began to get weird.
You can’t eat here, but you can’t have it to go either
This is what the server told us when I got up to leave and take our order to go because we didn’t want any alcohol. I totally respect restaurants that don’t do to go orders, but when you say you don’t do to gos while standing next to an open case of takeaway containers, it’s obvious that you’re lying.
She told us that we had to pay for our order in its entirety (despite only half of it being made already), but we weren’t allowed to keep it or take it home with us. I kept trying to come up with solutions to the problem so we could still eat our food, but she wouldn’t have it. She just got madder and madder and kept escalating the situation.
When I told her that I absolutely wasn’t going to do that, she just got mad and started shouting something in Japanese to her coworkers. This is when it truly hit me that there was no out of the situation: we were getting scammed in Tokyo within 5 hours of landing.
$10 table charge for a few beans
After a few minutes of arguing, they finally came to a conclusion. We would be paying a $10 table charge for “wasting their time” and all the “table snacks” that we ate. Then she threw away the half of our order that was done directly in front of us instead of just handing it over and allowing us to pay.
In reality, we sat down for less than five minutes in an empty restaurant, Jia had one of these little bean things they put on the table, ordered some sushi, and then were berated for not wanting to buy alcohol despite other tables not having any.
It was obvious that this “table snack fee” wasn’t real, because I watched the girl type it into the computer instead of hitting a button like every other menu item had pre-programmed into their system.
I still don’t fully understand why they were so rude and adamant that we couldn’t have the food that we paid for, but eventually I just paid the made up charge and disputed it on my credit card that night (shoutout to you, Chase, you at least resolved the financial aspect of getting scammed in Tokyo).
All in all, my layover was a fun experience, but it’s not a place that I’m dying to go back. Getting scammed in Tokyo left a bad taste in my mouth for all of Japan, which is a real shame because everybody else there was very nice and tried to show up a good time in their country.
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