Colin Goh and Woo Yen Yen

The following was published in the Sunday Times on 18 November 2007:

Sunday Times 18 November 2007
Maid in Japan
by Colin Goh

“A what café?” I said to my friend Ichi-san while visiting Tokyo three weeks ago. (‘Ichi’ is not his real name. To avoid potential embarrassment, I’ve had to fudge certain bits to protect the identities of those involved.)

“A maid café,” replied Ichi-san. “A café where the waitresses are dressed like French maids, with short black dresses and white frilly aprons. And address you as ‘Master’.”

I’d asked Ichi-san to take me on an insider’s tour of Tokyo: no touristy museums, temples or designer malls. I wanted to see where regular Tokyoites go – and perhaps glimpse the source of how they’ve managed to inspire and influence so many people worldwide, myself included. Now I was wondering if I’d be biting off more than I could chew.

Thus far, Ichi-san had taken me to the wonderful Ghibli Museum in Mitaka, the giant Mandarake manga store in Shibuya, and a 24 hour manga café in Kabuki-cho, where one can rent a private booth to read comics, surf the net or even stay the night. (There are similar establishments which rent out adult DVDs instead of comics, who advertise vibrating seats to enhance the viewing experience.)

Then he shifted gears by showing me a DIY doll boutique, a doll love hotel (both recounted in my last column), a seven-storey porn emporium thronged by very normal-looking salarymen thumbing through very abnormal-looking titles; and a ‘Soapland’, an establishment which, since this is a family newspaper, I can only describe as being very dirty and very clean at the same time.

Then came the maid cafés – which managed to combine east and west, chaste and kinky, as well as the bizarre and logical, all in one stop.

I say logical, because the maid cafés fulfill a market need. The vast majority of these establishments are located in the electronics/anime hub of Akihabara, the preferred hangout of the “otaku”, a Japanese term applied to geeks who stay at home and play video games, watch cartoons and read comics a little too much for their own good. (Not unlike many of my friends, and, um, me too, actually.) And after a hard day’s hunting for games/robots/comics/schoolgirl uniforms, otaku need to eat.

Now, what kind of establishment might prove attractive to them? Perhaps a place where they can act out their confused colonized fantasies with the assistance of cute chicks? But make no mistake: maid cafés are not disguised houses of ill repute.

“You can get the maids to play with you,” said Ichi-san. “But like video games. Or jankenpon (Japanese for ‘scissors-paper-stone’). I hear at some joints, if you pay extra, they’ll clean your ears, or give you a foot massage. But that’s it.”

“Let’s go for dinner at one!” said Ni-san, another pseudonymous Singaporean friend visiting Japan. “With Japanese culture so popular, maybe I can start one up in Singapore.”

“I hear there’s one already,” replied Ichi-san. “But I don’t know what it’s like.”

“I wonder if Singaporeans have the same ‘maid’ associations as the Japanese,” I mused. “Maybe a Singaporean maid café is one where the waitresses speak Tagalog, call you ‘Sir’ and ‘Mum’, and go outside to clean the windows while you eat.”

Our first choice, the magnificently-named ‘Little Beauty’s Satanic Dining’, where the maids also wear devil’s horns, had already closed for the evening, so we headed to ‘@Home’, a discreet café on the fifth floor of a building off Chuo-dori, Akihabara’s main shopping avenue. The special of the day, according to a menu in the lift lobby, was rice wrapped in an omelette, with a smiley face drawn on it in ketchup. Clearly, the cuisine was not the main attraction here.

When we arrived at the cafe, we saw a big sign at the entrance prohibiting photo-taking, and that the customers were all male, mostly sitting alone. It felt rather sad.

A maid with furry cat’s ears on her head, bounced to the front, an apologetic look on her face. “Sorry, Master, last orders have closed,” she said in Japanese. “Come back tomorrow.” We tried pleading in half-past six Japanese that we were tourists on our last day, but she stood firm. “Cannot doing ne,” she responded reciprocally in half-past six English.

“I donno which is more loser,” I said to Ichi-san and Ni-san on the way out. “Wanting to go to a maid café, or being turned away by one.”

Returning to the train station, I noticed a sign for an ‘Imouya’. “What’s that?” I asked Ichi-san.

“A little sister café,” he replied. “Where the waitresses call you ‘big brother’ and….”

“Let’s not go there,” said Ni-san. “In every sense of the phrase.”

And we didn’t.

Share on Facebook