A Chinese cuisine restaurant in Kyoto has a controversial booking website.
When switching from Japanese to English on the booking website, a message appeared in English saying ‘We only accept reservations from people who speak Japanese’. It doesn’t appear in Japanese, but when switching English, Chinese or Spanish, there is a notification at the beginning, and their business hours and other information remain in Japanese.
The shop said, ‘We want to welcome foreign tourists, but we can’t hire enough English speaking staff. We don’t intend to exclude certain people’, revealing acute internal reasons.
In fact, there are restaurants in Tokyo that similarly limit their reservation handling to Japanese-speaking customers. After all, ‘All the staff can only speak Japanese, so we respond in Japanese. We mean that if you still want to come to our shop, we don’t refuse you’.
In response, foreigners visiting Japan said that they could fully understand the situation in the shops (a person from USA) and that they didn’t see this as discrimination (a person from Finland).
In a shop, seven of 30 staff speak English. Some days there is no English speaking staff due to shifts.
Is it not racial discriminatory for a shop to choose its customers by language?
Koji Mizokami, a lawyer says: ‘In this case, they are focusing on the language used by those who cannot speak Japanese, but if they refuse entry only to those of a certain nationality or a certain ethnic group, it could be considered a tort under the Civil Code. If they are focusing on the difficulty of communication, I think it would be difficult to fall under discrimination”.
