Maid Cafe

I visited a maid cafe yesterday. Maid cafes are popular in Akihabara, a section of Tokyo where the otaku hang out. Otaku are hard-core fans of anime and manga, and they enjoy the fantasized French-style maids who serve the customers as a maid would serve her "master" and "mistress" in their home. I heard that the maids greet customers by saying "welcome home master" but if they said this I wasn't able to understand it.

Customers are not allowed to take pictures inside the cafe, but I managed to take a couple of shots of maids on the street, inviting potential customers to visit the cafes. There are more than 30 maid cafes in Akihabara.

Really, I thought the "maid" service was not much different from service in a typical Japanese restaurant (which is much better than service in American restaurants, and you are not expected to tip). But the maid server did lots of cutsy things like making a cute drawing using ketchup over a plate of food. She drew a ketchup bunny, and as she drew she said, in a little girl voice that I can't even begin to imitate, "these are the ears, and the nose ..." For my benefit she said this in English. One visit to a maid cafe was enough for me. The food wasn't so great, and I don't really care for the idea of being "served" by a maid, but it was something to see once.

Also, it helped me see the importance of fantasy in Japanese culture. Japan is a huge exporter of its fantasy culture such as anime and manga.

People can go to a maid cafe and enjoy the fantasy of being served by a maid for an hour or two over coffee and dessert. But like all fantasies, some people take it too far. Maid cafes often have printed rules warning customers not to touch the maids, not to ask for their phone numbers, and not to wait outside the cafe for a maid to finish her shift.

There are also butler cafes, which cater to women customers, and cross-dressing cafes where men dress as maids or women dress as butlers.

More information about maid cafes is available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maid_cafe.

Soba

Soba are buckwheat noodles, a common food in Japan. You can eat soba noodle soup at cheap restaurants where the customers eat standing at a counter, or at expensive specialty restaurants where the soba is made by hand in the front window of the restaurant, as pictured here.

Soba noodle soup is eaten with chopsticks, and should be slurped. I find it funny to stand in a restaurant eating soba with twenty standing slurping strangers. I like eating soba with chopsticks, but I'm not very good at slurping. At first it took me longer than average to eat a bowl of soba, but now I can eat it as quickly as the other customers.

Below is a plastic model of a plate of soba. Japanese restaurants usually have realistic-looking plastic models of their food in the front window. This is great for illiterate folks like me. The factory that makes most of this plastic "food" is in the mountains not far from Tokyo, and I've heard that tourists can try their hand at making plastic food there for a small fee.

I also like soba in the form of tea, made by pouring hot water over buckwheat kernels in a mug. More information about soba is available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soba.