Maid Café, Akihabara

Today we visited Akihabara and made a brief foray into a manga shop which was extremely porn and a trip to the Mac Shop and a couple of other electronics stores.

Akihabara is a great place to go if you're looking for discount electronics or you are a single gal on the go who would like to pick up a geek who has never before spoken to a woman.

After cruising around for a while, I suggested we go to a Maid Café.

We went to At Home Café which in the site we were at, had four floors of cafés. We got in the lift and selected the sixth floor because it had English speaking maids. When we got to the floor, it was so crowded that the line went well down the stairs so we decided to try the seventh floor which also had English speakers but the maids were in regular (?) maid costumes rather than kimonos.

Once we arrived, we still had to wait for a while, then the maids greeted us with "Welcome home master and mistress!" in Japanese of course, then after a short wait assigned us to an English speaking maid but not until they had run through the rules:

1. No touching the maids.
2. No photographs.
3. No asking the maids about themselves.
4. Maids cannot leave the café. Do not ask them to.
5. You must order at least one thing off the menu and pay a cover charge of 700 yen.

We sat down and our maid, who spoke English like a Valley Girl, ran through the menu of sweet and savoury treats, (none of which will feature in Gordon Ramsay's next book) before leaving us to ponder in the frighteningly pink kawaii surroundings. I ordered a sweet pancake and a caramel café latte. Alex ordered a coke and waffles. I also ordered a photo, but decided not to order any of the other entertainment items such as playing cards with a maid, playing checkers or playing the Japanese equivalent of rock, paper scissors because I was fighting off a rising sense of panic like any natural person would be.

The atmosphere was entirely bizarre. There were about 15 women, probably under 20, running around in chocolate brown and white maid's costumes with large pink bows around their necks, many of which featured a brooch in the middle of the bow such as a 10cm Mickey Mouse doll or a sequined red heart as well as numerous scrunchies round their wrists and bags in the shape of Tweety Bird or unidentifiable fluffy animals. My head was spinning. Alex had lost the power of speech.

To my left sat a young man who seemed painfully shy and who ordered the cheapest thing off the menu (a black coffee) before playing a game of Uno with our Valley Girl. To our left sat a couple.

When our maid brought our drinks, she made us play a game with her to cast a magic spell over them. We had to form our hands into a heart shape then say, "Miu Miu, Kyu!" The same went for the food. Part of the price of the pancakes covered the maid drawing a picture for me in chocolate topping on the plate. She drew a cat. Sweet Felix on a Stick.

But the most disturbing was yet to come.

For my photo, I had to choose which maid I wanted to be photographed with. I said, "Oh really, it's fine, you choose, you all seem like lovely intelligent, capable women, who will no doubt one day have Masters in IT" but they weren't having a bar of that so I had to pick someone at random.

The odd thing was, the whole thing was at once surreally bordeline fetishistic but not at all sexual. The maids are not sexy; they're deliberately very cute and girlie. There are couples there and women in twos and threes who seem to have come just as friends and get photos altogether with the maids. There are lonely guys and groups of five or six guys who just seem friendly and don't at all harrass the maids.

Without warning, the lights dimmed and a disco colour ball started scrolling. The maids did a wacky cute dance that seemed to be to some sort of well known nursery song. Several of the guys in the audience (who would have been at home at Forrest Gump's bus-stop bench) got up and started dancing and doing actions during the chorus in an unsettlingly enthusiastic way. The girls looked slightly concerned but kept fixed smiles on their faces; they're professional maids, people. Alex and I tried to work out where security would come from if it was needed.

Finally the sing song was over and I was called up for my photo. I resisted the maids' entreaty to put a pair of bunny ears on my head. They nodded undestandingly but insisted I made a heart symbol with my hands. They took a polaroid which they eventually presented to me (heavily transcribed with cute scribblings) when Alex and I asked for the bill. With the bill, they also gave us a loyalty card which said we had reached Level 1 of our Licence of Your Majesty but if we kept coming back, who knows where we might end up?

If travel is about experiencing an entirely different world, the Maid Café is a must have experience for travellers to Japan.

If you're interested, just take the subway to Akihabara, look for the girls handing out flyers, and make your way to a nearby café. The @Home franchise is pretty large but I'm sure the others are just as insane. FYI: the girls on the street handing out don't like being photographed either.

Below is a video which doesn't have much but is at the same place we went to so you can get a feel. Goodness knows how it was filmed given it's prohibited but anyhoot:

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