Dual Fantasy: Maids and Otaku

Hmm, this blog title would make a good game name... anyway, I haven't seriously written much in the last month, and i need to make up for it. K, Here we go!

So about two weeks or so ago, I had a really bad cold and I had been stuck in the house most of the day. The weather was bad as the cold, but when I was given a chance to meet a friend from online for the first time, I was curious enough that I couldn't pass it up. His name is Sasaki and he had found me in Mixi (Japanese MySpace) in April, occasionally messaging me since then. At first I thought he was interested in me as a woman, but I think now he just likes America friends who know Japan. He had been studying abroad in America for 3 years, living in Boston and Alabama I think. Well, having never lived in Tokyo or even lived in Japan for a while, he emailed me and asked if I would meet him to show him Tokyo.

Me, a foreigner, showing a native Japanese his country. (O_o)

So I agreed to meet him in Ueno since that was close to his house. Alright, that's fine , I thought, Ueno is plenty touristy. However when I met him, he said that he had never been to Akihabara (Electric Town, home to all things electronic and nerdy), and could we please, please go to Akihabara??? Alright fine, sure, why not... for some reason when Japanese people find out I like Anime, they all want to go with me to Akihabara... So we walked from Ueno to Akihabara (about 15 mins)... he was looking around and "ooo"ing and "aaah"ing more than any other foreign tourist I'd ever seen... maybe because he'd been living in America's boonies? Anyway though when we got to Akihabara, he said, "Hey you've been to a maid cafe before, right? Maybe since you know about them, you could take me to one!!"

If you don't know, a maid cafe is where girls of varying degrees of beauty dress up in maid outfits or otherwise and greet customers with the phrase "Welcome master!", serving food and fetish to mostly male clientèle. Some cafes simply serve food and maybe make small talk with the customers, while others offer massages, hand feeding, and more... I've been to the more normal maid cafes (Pinoforia and @home Cafe) twice before this with girl friends interested in what exactly attracted men to this.

So... I'm going to spend my saturday night with a guy I know from online at a fetish cafe in geek paradise.

...Strange, but better than staying home!

I really didn't want to take him to the cafe lest my reputation of being knowledge about such cafes grow anymore, but Sasaki was so persistent, I eventually agree to simply show him where the best one, @home, was so that he could go there again later with a friend or something. But once we were in the lobby, it was apparent that merely taking a quick look around would not be enough for him. He paid my 300yen ($2.50) entrance fee and we waited a while for a table to be free.

While we were waiting, I glanced around the room to gather what kinds of people frequent this type of place... a group of giggly girls, some boys already old enough to start going the way of the geek, men who still dress like they are young boys... never shy to gain information, I turned to a guy next to me and asked him why he came to this cafe over other ones. He told me it was because the maids here were the cutest and kindest and they really seemed to care about the customers. Hmm, ok, thanks.

After waiting a while, we enter the cafe... it has a very Japanese atmosphere, with low lighting, Japanese koto music, and the maids wearing kimomo and hakama. There is a large, square, raised platform that serves as a "bar" from which the maids serve and entertain. We sit at the "bar", next to an otaku looking guy wearing thick glasses and playing a Nintendo DS. Eventually me and my friend get into a conversation with this guy... he working for a computer company, lives alone, and comes to this cafe often because the maids are easy to talk to. Indeed, he seems very "at home" in this cafe, knowing the names of all the maids, even referring to them with the endearing title "-chan".

While my friend continues to chat this otaku-guy up, I overhear a maid's conversation with another customer and she speaks English. I interrupt my friend and he helps me to get her over so I can talk to her. I ask her why she works this kind of job and she tells me that she like cosplay and has always wanted to work in Akihabara, so this is a good job for her. So I ask her if she thinks that she is helping her customers to gain confidence to speak to girls outside the cafe or if she is inhibiting them by wrapping themselves in fantasy. This she couldn't really answer this question, so she said she thought she was helping them, maybe.

(My friend kept apologizing for my rather straight-forward questions, saying "Oh please excuse her, my friend is drunk...")

So I asked her, "What would happen if you met one of your customers outside of work, like at the train station as you were going home?" She replied "I would try to ignore them and not let them see me. Even if they did talk to me, I would just reply quickly and go."

I said, "Don't you care about your customer's feelings?"

"No, not like that," she said. "It's just a job."

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I thought about this a lot, I think it plays into Japanese society's "role" structure. In Japanese society, you are much less an individual as you are a member of a group and the role you play in that group defines you. Obviously, this is very limiting, so a way to briefly break out of the confinement is to change roles and live a fantasy. The otaku-guy lives the fantasy of being master of the maids and the maids get to play dress-up. But when fantasy time is over, they slip back into their normal roles, just as nothing ever happened.....

My friend Ryosuke says "I think it's kind of romantic though, 'cause it seems like both people are enjoying the maid cafe from their own perspective and both are living as normal people outside that cafe. I don't think most of those maids talk to those "otaku-types" but those two people can talk, communicate, and enjoy themselves together at the cafe. It's ok to live out what is not real as long as they know it's not real, because people sometimes need to escape from reality especially for most of Japanese in Tokyo, since it's a cold and heartless city in the world's most stressful society."

I think i want to keep investigating this "role-playing" in Japanese society... I also wonder what is the difference between living in Tokyo and living in a smaller city....

The journey continues... and I'm enjoying the ride ^_^

(P.S. 7 days, see you at Narita Kochan~)