Your best bet is the Shinjuku area; many restaurants have either pictures, English menus or models of the food. Reasonably priced too.

Most places do not have English menus. If they do, it's often a shortened one. Low- and mid- price places tend to have plastic models(sometimes pictures), especially restaurants located on top of every major department store. Bring a good guide book with Japanese menu translations, or search on the internet.

I don't think I went to a restaurant in Tokyo that didn't at least have pictures on the menu, English, or the plastic food on dislay at the entrance or some combination of all 3.

Most of the places I went to in Tokyo, including small Japanese restaurants had pictures or the staff spoke some English.

Try a kaiten or conveyor belt sushi place where you just grab the plates of what looks appealing off of the conveyor belt as it comes around by you- very easy, no English or Japanese required as teh paltes are colour coded by price with signs clearly displayed. There are a few in the Ueno area that are good.

Food in Tokyo is some of the best I have had in all of my travels.

If you would like to ask if a restaurant has an english menu you can say:

Eigonomenuo onegaishimasu = Do you have an English Menu please

trying to pronounce that without learning the Japanese way of pronuciation is pointless.

http://web.mit.edu/~isshinryu/www/pronun.html

This helps! Thanks to all!

You can always just pick something out from all of the plastic food they have in the restaurants for all of us "gaijins" - it's usually always delicious!

Pictures don't always help you know what you're ordering. I had a very memorable eating experience in Kyoto many years ago when I ended up ordering the same (to me, terrible) dish for both lunch and dinner at two different restaurants. I chose by pointing at a photo or plastic model--obviously not realistic enough in their depictions or else I wouldn't have made the same mistake a second time. Both times it looked really appetizing. The dish was a bowl of rice with a raw egg cracked over the top, the theory being that the hot rice cooks the egg. It does so only imperfectly. Nasty.

I don't think it was oyako donburi as I don't recall any chicken, but maybe the half-raw egg has obscured that part of the memory. But perhaps it was just the hypersensitivity of a first-time visitor: on a later trip I ate sashimi made from pork liver and from chicken and enjoyed them both a lot.

katsu don (breaded pork/chicken), unagi yanagawa don (eel)