On a scale of one to seriously weird, our next activity was about a seven and we were extremely excited to see what all the fuss was about. Having met up with Takae, who was back from her business trip to India,  I insisted she take us to a maid-o cafe. Maid-o cafes are a chain of cosplay restaurants in Japan full of cute, young, innocent looking waitresses dressed in cosplay outfits- most commonly sexy French maid costumes with fluffy animal ears. Anyone picking up on a familiar theme?

The maids greet you at the door, as if you were arriving home, and address you as “master” or “mistress”. But not like sexy French maid S&M style greeting, think more Disney characters baby talking while on helium. They then basically spend the evening acting as your cute little maid. This includes kneeling by your table every time you speak to her, playing little games with you such as rock, paper, scissors, card games, board games etc and singing and performing with you usually baby songs while making heart shapes with your hands. To call the waitress over you have to pretend you’re a baby and make baby sounds. In some maid-o cafes, maids spoon feed you, massage you (fully clothed) and even offer ear cleaning services.

Not weird enough yet? Well here comes the weird part- who do you think frequents these establishments? Kids? Nope. Groups of friends out for a laugh? Guess again. I’ll give you a clue, they move in packs of one and they’re male. Yes ladies and gentlemen, it’s our favourite bunch of perverts, you guessed it; Single, middle-aged Japanese men. I actually have no idea if they are single or married and they’re not all middle-aged to be fair, some are in their late 20s and 30s, but honestly anything over 15 and out without friends is still kind of weird to me. 

They are basically hostess bars for the nerds of Akihabara, where their fetishised characters come to life. Except this isn’t some seedy joint in a hidden location deep in the red light district. This is a chain of restaurants in the main areas of central Tokyo, open to the public, like a Starbucks in Piccadilly Circus, where anyone could walk in off the street.  

As soon as we walked in and sat down we were given fluffy animal ears to wear. The young man in a suit and briefcase sitting at the table next to us, who had obviously just come straight from the office, then complained that he hadn’t receive his bunny ears yet. His maid-o obliged straight away of course, while I picked my jaw up off the ground.

Luckily our maid-o (who I must admit was extremely cute) opted to call us princesses rather than mistresses which made it a lot less awkward for all involved. We chatted with our maid-o through our at times embarrassed translator, Takae. The maid-o never break character so most of the chats are about sparkle, clouds, dream land and other mentally stimulating topics. We received a book with profiles of our maid-o. Ours was from “sparkle land”, had the blood group “super star” and her best assets were her “voice and hips”. You’re beginning to get the picture I think. 

We ordered some katsu curry as you have to order something every hour to make sure you don’t spend all evening there perving over the maid-o. Our maid-o kindly made our curry into a cute little bear design and we sang a nice song to make sure it was extra magical. After that we didn’t stay long- we had seen more than enough. We took a nice photo with our maid-o (the only photo allowed as you can’t take pictures inside) and said our goodbyes. I’ve seen a lot of things in my travels but this was definitely a unique experience. Kawahiiii!

courtesy of google