Moving away from the tourist spots and the expat nighttime hangouts such as Shibuya, Roppongi or Asakusa, it can be intimidating for a newcomer or visitor to decipher the Japanese-only izakaya menus in some of the less well-known areas of Tokyo.
Tokyo Kanpai Summit, a new social-networking service, seeks to solve this problem by pairing up tourists visiting Japan or newcomers to the city with locals who want to meet someone from another country.
"When we went backpacking abroad, the most memorable thing was becoming friends with the locals," says TKS brand director Kohei Hisada, whose experiences traveling abroad with one of the other three TKS founders served as inspiration for the startup.