April 16th, 2006 | The lowdown by Matthew Hernon

Snack Bars in Fuji: Not All They Seem

Why not go to a snack bar where you can enjoy a few nibbles and wash them down with a few pints? Sounds innocent enough, right? The reality, however, is quite different. A few pints in a snack bar could cost you an astronomical amount.

Yoshiwara, a suburb in Fuji City, is very small and quiet and therefore, as you’d expect, doesn’t have many places to go at night. It is, however, swarming with Snack Bars. Having been warned about these over-priced establishments by a friend, I was really hoping to avoid them.

The problem is that there are not many alternatives. A student persuaded me to go with him one night and we decided on one called ‘China Town’. (I don’t know why it’s called that; the owner and her daughter are not Chinese and they haven’t even been to China.) Inside it was a small and not very clean-looking. The daughter of the owner spent her time talking to us and pouring us drinks, which was ok, but it was hard to enjoy the attention while wondering how high the bill is going to be as she tries to pour you some more. In the end I just wanted to get out as soon as possible. When the bill came, it was quite a relief that my two very small beers cost less than 3000 yen. I had heard it could be much worse.

The truth is these places are a rip off. It is far more fun to go to an izakaya and spend 3000 yen on all you can drink for a couple of hours. Japanese people love talking to foreigners, so there’s no point paying so much money just to speak to a good looking Japanese girl.