Maid in the USA

For Anime Fans: Maids for a Day (Washington Post)

Coverage of a temporary Akiba-style maid café set up at Katsucon, an anime convention held just outside of Washington DC. Is it just me, or does the whole maid phenomenon get even creepier when removed from its Japanese milieu? The "racial cosplay" element of the participants taking Japanese names is intriguing, as are the lengths the author goes to to assure readers that this isn't a front for some kind of S&M scene.

In Japan the conventional wisdom is that maid cafés are hostess clubs for the otaku crowd, but stripped of that specific contextual anchor in America, they must seem like the frontier of a vast and unexplored psychosexual terrain.

Comments

[Roger]

More material for my thesis about how American anime fans are cosplaying as Japanese anime fans.

[ChrisM]

wow...look at the things you miss by not going to local anime conventions..

[MattAlt]

The ironic thing is,from my last time visiting one in Akihabara I got the sense that there are far are more local tourists (from within Japan) at Tokyo maid cafes than actual otaku. So is it really a "trend"? A lot of the foreign press portraying it as such seems like wishful thinking.

[Matt]

It was a trend, in, like, 2004... which means the foreign press is right on target to start hyping it.

The interesting difference between a hostess club and a maid cafe is that in a hostess club someone sits by you all night (in theory). In a maid cafe, you get the deference and the cute girls, but not the company (although you can buy it in short blocks of time, depending on the place, for specific games or whatever). Very telling in re what otaku men vs non-otaku men are after.

[MattAlt]

>>someone sits by you all night (in theory).

In my singular experience in a hostess club, the hostesses were rotated every twenty minutes or so. So you spent half the evening making introductions for the nth time. But I suppose that only goes on until you pick a favorite.

I think the "hostess" angle sounds vaguely glamorous abroad, but I found it quite a sad experience inside -- it is essentially conversational prostitution, in which men who normally couldn't get the time of day from a woman pay for talk.