My Japanese is poor. Maybe he meant Japanese only for reservation, maybe he even meant he only speaks Japanese
However first thing I asked was I would like to reserve today (I know how to say that for sure) I got a load of negatives in the response. So then I asked if Lalah was there today and then he basically said sorry, Japanese only.
Strange though because the front desk guy always spoke English when I went before. As I said not recently been though.