Tokyo Explorer

photos: Rob Goss
Japan’s nerds –its otaku- have always been a much-maligned bunch. They’ve been derided for their compulsive collecting, their obsessions for anime and comic books, and for their bizarre desires for Lolita-like idols. Not surprisingly then, when someone decided to open a themed café where young women dressed in frilly French-maid outfits treat their customers like gods, they did so in Akihabara – Japan’s otaku Mecca.

The opening of that first maid café in 2001 unleashed a trend that has since seen approximately 30 more maid cafes open in Akihabara alone, not to mention spin-offs running the gamut from maid hair salons to maid foot massage and more recently “butler cafes” designed with a female clientele in mind.

The success of maid cafes is a small but highly recognizable part of the continued growth of the country’s otaku consumer market, a market comprised of 1.72 million consumers and worth 411 billion yen annually according to the most recent research conducted by the Nomura Research Institute in October 2005. But why all the fuss about themed cafés with generally overpriced fare where the staff call you ‘master,’ flirt a bit and occasionally spoon feed the customers?

For social commentator Tomoko Inukai the answer is simple – the rise of maid cafés is down to “the fetish for young women among Japanese men,” and the cafes’ ability to “offer a chance for men often oppressed in their daily life to escape into a fantasy world.” So, have these cafes simply tapped in on the desires of a generation of socially inept males seeking to fill the female voids in their lives with the company of innocent-looking and servile young women? There might be more to it than that.

photo: Rob GossAt Cure Maid Café where it all began, manager Katsunori Hazama suggests it is less about male sexual fantasy and more about relaxation. “Our shop’s concept is Iyashi (healing), so we offer organic tea, gardening, relaxing music, and a cosy space where customers can relax,” he says. “We don’t have any over-the-top games,” although a lot of cafes do give customers the option of playing janken (Rock-Paper-Scissors) and other games with their maids at a cost.

Relaxation and comfort is a far cry from the somewhat sleazy image maid cafés have been given in the media, but Hazama’s reasoning that they serve as a place to unwind is echoed by Sakurai at another Akihabara café, CosCha, where janken is on the menu. “The main reason people like maid cafes is that the distance between staff and customers differs from normal cafés,” Sakurai says. “Familiar shop, familiar faces, chatting in a cosy atmosphere - we think this is one reason why customers keep coming back.”

If men are into maid cafes for reasons of escapism, relaxation or self-indulgence, what about female customers? Although the majority of customers are men in their 20s and 30s, the number of women visiting maid cafes is continuing to rise.

“Recently we have a lot of female customers,” says Cure Maid’s Hazama, “About 35 percent.” That figure is not uncommon, and in maid cafes across Akihabara calls of “welcome home, mistress” are increasingly heard alongside the familiar “welcome home, master” - the maid café answer to the traditional welcoming call of Japanese shops and restaurants, “irrashaimase.”

To understand why women have taken to a fad apparently targeted at young men is in part to understand why women are queuing up to work as maids. And queuing up they are. At Mia Café, Hiroyasu Terajima says somewhere between 300 and 500 women apply for each job vacancy on the back of seeking something more glamorous than a run of the mill job, and yet being realistic. “I think compared to hoping to be a stewardess or TV announcer, becoming a maid is more attainable,” he says.

Of course, just as not everyone who works at Disney is a Disney fanatic, not every maid is an otaku. Moe from Mia Café, every inch the epitome of the maid image with her black and white pinafore, big dark eyes and hair draped around her face, is adamant about that. “It’s just a normal part-time job,” she says explaining that she found it by chance while looking for part-time work. “Whether people work at Disneyland or at a maid café, it’s just work.”

That may be disappointing for a diehard otaku to hear, but it is a sign that maid cafes and the otaku they were designed to serve are becoming more and more mainstream. As the media begins painting otaku in a sympathetic light and as the image of otaku as kind-hearted introverts like the character Tsuyoshi Yamada in Densha Otoko begins to replace that of the sad loner, cafes that were once an otaku domain are now very much open to the public – just like any other theme restaurant.

Rob Goss