The Environment Ministry said Friday that it has punished a 71-year-old part-time worker at Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden in central Tokyo for neglecting to collect entry fees from some non-Japanese speakers.

According to the ministry, the worker claimed that he was not familiar with foreign languages and had been traumatized by trouble with a foreign visitor.

The worker was punished with a 10 percent pay cut for a month. He voluntarily resigned the same day, offering to return half of his retirement benefit, or ¥300,000.

He provided tickets for free to foreign visitors who did not seem to him prepared to pay fees of ¥200 for general visitors and ¥50 for elementary and junior high school students. He did this by issuing tickets on a ticketing machine and later canceling them.

All cancellations, including legitimate ones, were logged for a total of some 160,000 tickets on the machine, which was also used by other workers, from April 2014.

The misconduct was reported by another worker in December.