Tokyo Doesn't Want Its Menus Lost in Translation

A poor grasp of English—or for that matter, any language not native to the speaker—can do some serious damage to a menu. Consider the "cock skin juice pressed from a bitter orange" offered by one restaurant in Japan, or the conveyor-belt restaurant that explains, "The sushi is thrown on the lane."

Not exactly enticing for the those of use who aren't cock skin aficionados.

But not every restaurant has the wherewithal to translate its menu into grammatically pristine or even broken foreign tongues. Tokyo would like to change that.

Well in advance of the 2020 Summer Olympics, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government has launched a new online service that helps restaurateurs translate their offerings in up to 12 foreign languages, as well as a restaurant database that will help starry-eyed gaijin figure out where the hell they can eat that's not a vending machine.

While a previous version of the service has existed since 2009, the new Eat Tokyo site has added Taiwanese Mandarin, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Thai, Indonesian, Vietnamese, and Arabic to its previous offerings of English, Korean, and simplified Chinese. According to The Asahi Shimbun, the online translator contains 6,000 culinary terms of both well-known and highly local washoku—or traditional Japanese cuisine—as well as other foods.

Restaurateurs simply feed their menu items into the site, and out pops translations for items like Tokyo udo ("Tokyo mountain asparagus") or zarusoba ("Soba Noodles Served in a Basketlike Container with Dipping Sauce"). They can then print out a menu that features up to four languages at once in a variety of clip art-heavy templates.

The Tokyo government hopes that izakayas, ramen shops, and other small restaurants off the typical tourist path will benefit from the service, driving more foreign mouths into local haunts serving regional dishes. But since launching on January 20, the service has not exactly been an instant success. The Asahi Shimbun points out that only a handful of restaurants have signed up for Eat Tokyo, almost all around the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building. As of today, there were as many restaurants offering "Western-style food" as there were ramen shops listed on the site.

Perhaps the government needs to build more awareness, or perhaps some restaurant owners understandably don't want international rabble turning locals-only eateries into polyglot Star Wars cantinas. Then again, how will graceless Westerners ever learn how to properly eat sushi or get an education in Japanese craft beer if we don't know where to go?