Issyuku Hotel Kaminarimon

I booked an apartment for the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games via booking.com. Given the Japanese government implemented a travel ban to foreign nationals, I was unable to enter the country to honor the reservation. I contacted the apartment directly using the booking.com tool to explain the situation and request for a refund and ended up not getting any response after following up twice. I had booking.com customer service involved and it turned out that the apartment refused to refund my down payment. I attempted to call the apartment and was answered by a Chinese native speaker who barely spoke English and promised to handle my refund in a week. However, it's been months and there hasn't been any updates. It's very disappointing for the apartment not to be cooperative with the current circumstances outside the customer's control. I have some friends who made reservations with hostels and hotels owned by local Japanese people and received full refunds over their reservations in response to the local government's travel ban even though the reservations were supposed to be non-refundable UPDATE: Booking.com informed me that I was eligible for free cancellation. As such, I was under an impression that I was eligible for a refund since there were many hotels in Japan providing refunds to their customers being unable to travel in response to the government travel ban including the non-refundable reservations. This "free cancelation" term appeared to be deceiving to customers. I also provided evidence of travel ban prohibiting foreign nationals from entering Japan to attend the Olympic Games and I was told that it's not sufficient to evidence my inability to travel. I was expecting the host to be more understanding regarding the situation why I wasn't able to honor the reservation. In addition, this would give more time to find a new tenant since the local spectators were still permitted to attend at that time rather than if I made a last minute cancellation