Meidonomics

Pat Galbraith has an interesting article about how maid cafes are a bulwark of stability in these troubled economic times.

He dryly notes, “Maids in the original sense are not sex workers, though this is perhaps not always the case at the 200-plus cafes around the country.”

This I find interesting. Though it may be a one-sided perception, there has long been a sense of exotic sexuality tentatively attached to cosplay in the West. It’s not new; as far back as Richard Feynman’s 1985 autobiography, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! one finds a well-educated Westerner at a nice Japanese inn uncertain as to whether or not the kimono-clad attendant is going to provide sexual favors. How much more confusing, then, would one find it at what is often translated into English as a “fetish cafe”?

It’s not hard to think of the supply of willing maids in familiar terms: just as waitresses in Los Angeles are often aspiring actresses, Galbraith writes of the maids, “most do it because they enjoy it, but a lucky few can become cosplay idols.”  Given that this fits the mindset so well, is it any surprise that Los Angeles has its own maid cafe?

For the Japanese otaku, perhaps personal interaction is at the heart of it. In an increasingly isolated society, people are starved for personal interaction. Japan, with its workaholic culture leading to deaths of karoshi, can only feel this problem more acutely.  Twitter, Facebook, and all social media – including, yes, blogs – aim to provide people with regular interaction. This would seem to be confimed: Galbraith reports that many customers are regulars.

Is it really very different from going to Starbucks because you chat with the barista, or going to the local pub where the bartender knows what you like? The more people hold up these behaviors as examples of how otaku differ from normal society, the more apparent it is that they see differences primarily because they want to see them.

Author: moritheil

One might be forgiven for thinking that Moritheil is a postmodern literary critic who started reviewing video games in 2001, and spent the early 2000s learning at the right hand of con staff and fansubbers. However, those rumors are spurious: Moritheil is actually a distant relative of Genghis Khan who stands poised to conquer the world via the Internet. Follow along at http://twitter.com/moritheil.

3 thoughts on “Meidonomics

  1. To be fair, maids implicitly have this whole subservience bit going on. Your example of baristas/bartenders doesn’t quite match up since most people (at least people I know) are going to treat baristas/bartenders as equals moreso than maids.

    If it weren’t maid cafes, but host/hostess clubs, it’d be a different story.

  2. I don’t suggest that they’re exactly the same; I merely suggest that they fall within the same category.  Both fill a human need for regular social interaction.

    (Consider: rugby is more violent than tennis, but both fill a need for exercise.)

    Your example of host clubs is pretty nice, though.

  3. I don’t think maids have the whole subservience thing going on, at least no more than a customer-is-always-right kind of a thing. Which is different than just a cosplay-theme host club, etc.
    And that is also what’s different about going to a bar or talking to your barista (…yuppie losers?)  because that’s not the point of the commercial activity (unless you’re just trying to hit on them or something). When you go to a maid cafe the point is to enjoy the whole theme-ness of it, the interaction with your servers being a major part of that.

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