OK, this is weird. Earlier I posted about a visit to a Japanese Girls Bar. I probably should have known better than to do it, but I decided to search for other strange Japanese bars. That search led me to Japanese maid cafés and hoo-boy, they take cringe to a whole new level.
In the above video (turn on captions) a fellow takes us on a visit to a maid café. The waitresses are dressed in frilly, mini-skirted French maid outfits and talk in high pitched giggly voices. They greet him as Master and take him to a table where his maid (the owner of the place) serves him. The dining experience starts out absurd and gets more and more entertainingly ridiculous as it proceeds.
After showing him the entire menu, in a relentlessly cheerful and enthusiastic manner, she brings him the drink he ordered. She also has a flask, and she makes him recite some magical words to turn the contents of the flask pink, which she then pours into the drink tuning it pink too. It's magic! They then have to recite some more magic to infuse the drink with love so's it tastes even more delicious.
This magic business goes on with every dish she brings and finally ends up with them waving around heart-shaped plastic magic wands as they do their incantations. Along the way she also draws a cartoon bear on the eggs on top of his rice and eventually they take a picture together. For the picture he has to pose with her while wearing bunny ears. The guy's reaction through all this is hilarious. Understandably, he is completely embarrassed and yet he is still entertained by all the foolishness.
In trying to make sense out of this maid café lunacy I discovered it was rooted in Japanese anime culture. In fact, when the fellow first enters the café he says, "my otaku soul's screaming!" Otaku means: a person having an intense or obsessive interest especially in the fields of anime and manga. Appealing to that otaku crowd, the maid café is set up to be an anime world with the waitresses cosplaying as anime maids. In preparing this post I watched a recorded live stream made by two American guys and four girls who went to this same place -- their reactions were centered mainly around the anime elements of the café. They even recognized some of the anime characters the maids were imitating in their cosplay.
In the captions you'll see him use the word 'cute' repeatedly. Listening to the soundtrack he actually uses the Japanese word 'kawaii' which has a much more nuanced meaning than just cute. Kawaii refers to a specific cultural style. It refers to people or things that are "charming, vulnerable, shy and childlike". All of the elements of the café are deliberately kawaii: the color scheme, the frilly maid outfits, the high-pitched voices and giggling, the cutesy details of the food, the font styles they use, the goofy bunny ears, and the kid's games they play (shown in the video below). This is all performance theater for otaku fans.
Finally, we'll end with a video from Sue Perkins of the BBC visiting the same place. She's rather rude during the entire segment. What's she's obviously fixated on is the idea that these poor girls are forced to dress up and engage in this lunacy by the Eeeeevil patriarchy. What's funny is that much of this kawaii business was cooked up by young Japanese women (and one look at a J-pop boy band and the bunny ears the fellow above wears for his picture tells you that this kawaii stuff applies to boys as well as girls). Further, the neighborhood this café is in is the very center of otaku culture, so she has to know the context it sits in.
I picture her, in another setting, lecturing us about the wonders of diversity while all the time disdaining anything outside of her proscribed horizons. However, in fairness to Sue, I think it is part of a longer show called Japan with Sue Perkins so it may feel different when presented in the show, but in the clip we see she comes across as being insufferable. She ends the segment by informing us this is a place for shy men to interact with women. Well, it's partly that I suppose, but I think it is mainly just otaku Disneyland.
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2 comments:
There's always been weird stuff going on in society. Think of it being like gnarly old chewing gum stuck to the underside of the tables. Now with the wonders of the internet the gum is stuck topside.
Brave! Uninhibited! Better? I'm not sure.
T
As ridiculous as all the antics of the place are, I think it is just an anime themed restaurant. I've been to the district that café is located in and it is a commercial area heavy in anime/magna. On the street there will be all sorts of girls running around doing cosplay, or wearing kimonos, or dressed lolita style (and that style has nothing to do with Nabokov's sexualized Lolita, it is a style drawn from doll's clothes, Edwardian fashion, and whatever other lunatic accessories Japanese girls add).
That's one reason I think Sue Perkins so missed the boat in her observations of the place. She couldn't help but view it through her lens of the oppressive patriarchy. One of the telling moments of her segment is at the end when she asks the male customer if he would talk to a maid like that if he met her on the street. She's tsk-tsking and literally shaking her head in disapproval while he must be thinking to himself "why is this woman asking me such an insane question" as he says of course he wouldn't.
Regardless, whatever it is, it is a strange corner of the universe when viewed from outside.
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