Businesses charging foreigners more than locals? So they should

It would be easier to accept the “tourist price” if you could take the excuses on face value. It would be better if you could look at the reasoning from the Tokyo restaurateur who was recently found to be charging tourists more than locals to eat at his place and believe that’s all that’s going on here.

But do you? It was revealed that Tamatebako, a seafood buffet restaurant in tourist-heavy Shibuya, has been giving Japanese residents a 1000-yen discount ($9.30) off the price of a meal.

A restaurant in Tokyo’s Shibuya district has made news for charging foreigners more than locals.Credit: iStock

The owner, Shogo Yonemitsu, told the ABC there were a few reasons for this difference: foreign customers have forced him to hire English-speaking staff at higher wages, tourists have a habit of cancelling bookings at the last minute, and foreigners require extra labour to be taught the “right manners” at Japanese restaurants.

That last excuse, to me, raises a little red flag. Who needs to be taught manners at a seafood buffet? If there’s any style of eating foreigners understand, it’s this. We were made for all-you-can-eat dining. (Admittedly, it’s considered very bad manners in Japan to take more than you can eat and to waste food, though by the time foreigners have done that at Tamatebako it would be too late for education.)

It’s probably not too bold to suggest that Yonemitsu might just be sick of dealing with foreigners in his restaurant. They’re different. They’re annoying. They do things wrong. Charge them more.

If you could take his reasoning on face value, however, I would be 100 per cent on board with this notion of foreign tourists being forced to pay more for cultural rituals.

This isn’t a new thing, after all. There are many tourist sites around the world that have large discounts for locals (or, if you want to look at it a different way, charge tourists far more).

This two-tiered system is designed to allow local people access to their own cultural heritage, and recognises the often huge financial imbalance between those who can afford to fly thousands of kilometres to visit a tourist attraction for a lark, and those who just want to experience and appreciate their own culture, and plan to do so regularly.

I have no problem with that concept, and not just when we’re talking about government-run tourist sites. Tourists should have to pay more for most things.

It always makes me a little uneasy when travellers, say, shop at a market and declare that they haggled for the “local price”, instead of the tourist price. Do you deserve the local price? Do you earn local wages, and will you spend those wages here in this market probably a few times a week for the rest of your life? Definitely not. So, pay more.

There’s not so much of a financial imbalance in Japan, despite stagnant wages there and a dipping exchange rate (which makes little difference to those earning and spending yen). What you do have in Japan, however, is a growing issue of over-tourism, in which locals aren’t so much being priced out of their cultural heritage as forced out of it by the sheer number of others arriving to take limited places.

But I would maintain that even in Japan it’s fine for tourists to be forced to pay more than locals to visit historic attractions such Himeji Castle. It’s vital that people around the world have reasonable access to their own cultural heritage, Also, that heritage requires plenty of upkeep, so why not charge casual sightseers more to experience it?

Restaurant dining is a form of cultural heritage, even if it may not seem so to begin with, given you could pass off eating more as a necessity than an experience. But there are thousands of years of traditions and refinement that have been poured into almost every restaurant experience in Japan, and that’s something residents should be able to access and enjoy.

How much tradition there is in a seafood buffet, I’m not sure. And interestingly, if you apply this test to Australia – as in, would it be OK for Australian restaurants to charge foreigners more to dine with them – it starts to get a little icky.

Obviously, that would not be OK. But do we have thousands of years of our own cultural heritage being practised and celebrated in our restaurants? No. (However, if an Indigenous-run restaurant was serving native food and charging Indigenous people less to dine with them, I would be absolutely fine with that.)

I know of multiple restaurants around the world that already – quietly – run this two-tiered system. I was the beneficiary of it when I lived in northern Spain, and a three-Michelin-starred restaurant gave my partner and me a solid discount after discovering we resided in the area.

Food, after all, is culture, it’s heritage, it’s tradition. It’s identity. And everyone around the world deserves access to their own cultural identity.

That, at least, we can take on face value.