Sempai Waitresses

Sunday.

Junko Mizuno and I are sitting inside Anna Miller’s in Kichijoji. It’s what they call an “American style family restaurant” here in Japan. Naturally, it’s totally bizarre. Yellow Submarine era drawings of food and comfort hang on the walls (Peter Max chef in floppy hat feeding pie to a cat). The table is imitation aged wood. The color scheme around us is earthy: brown and orange. The portions are huge.  Junko is having the tuna salad. I’m with a club sandwich and a Kirin Larger. But it's not the food that I'm paying attention to.

I can’t stop staring at the waitresses.

“Please don’t do that,” Junko says laughing a little, but w ith some genuine discomfort as well.

Young women wearing pastel pink or yellow aprons. Their skirts are hiked up impressivley high. The uniform has been designed to accent the bust. And just above the butt is an enormous intricately tied bow. In short, Anna Miller’s is a very weird down home version of Hooters.

“I recommend the Key Lime Pie,” Junko says. Her English is flawless now.

The classic Anna Miller customer is an otaku. Sure enough, I spot at least adult three  males sulking by themselves in their pens attending to some manga, portable entertainment device, or simply staring off into deep space. This place is a clear prototype of the cosplay and maid cafes that have sprung up in Tokyo.

Junko tells me about some Anna Miller dojinshi she saw once that gives instructions on how best to use hidden cameras to take pictures up the staff’s skirts. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

“One of my friends was into cosplay,” Junko explains. “And they really wanted to get a real Anna Miller outfit. But when you stop working here, they make you return the uniform. So she had her co-worker tell her boss that she died. That way, she got to keep it."

"She became kind of a dominatrix after that. She called me and said that she would be doing a show where she would be wearing the outfit and would pee all over the stage. She wanted to know if I wanted to come and see. I haven’t talked to her since.”

“I got to try on the outfit once,” she says. For half a second I imagine the author of  Pure Trance and Cinderalla serving pie and coffee to a bunch of peep freaks armed with Akihabara  shoe cameras. “It was too tight. I could hardly breathe. You can’t even tie the bow in the back by yourself. One of the sempai waitresses has to do it for you.”

The mind reels. So I stare at the waitresses for confirmation of my own senses. The worst that can happen is that all of this will start to become normal. Soon, I’ll hit the two-week mark of my stay in Tokyo. After that is undiscovered country. I run the risk of getting comfortable now, imaging I could someday go native, feeling like I understand even a fraction of all this somehow.

“I always try to see things through the eyes of an alien,” Junko says. “I think you have to if you want to make manga or be a writer. Even when I am at home, I’m always trying to see things as objectively as possible.”

She asks a lot of questions about Bu-chan. Junko doesn’t have a cat, never has, but wants dearly wants one. I can’t help but brag a little.

“Bu-chan is fat and strong. Like a sumo wrestler,” I say. “He’s very smart and extremely sweet.”

“Sometimes dumb cats are nice too,” she insists. “I really like Scottish Fold cats. Their heads are too big for their bodies, and basically they are all retarded. Some cats will run and hide from people they don’t know. But Scottish Folds think that everyone is their friend. They have such big eyes.”

Meanwhile, the otaku in the corner is shooting me - the baka gaijin – an alternating current of dirty looks. Or maybe I’m just projecting the usual insecurities. Then again his face could just be cast that way, or  mutated by the burning passions of his waitress moe.

The guy at the counter who rings us up looks like Junichiro Koizumi. The Prime Minister of Japan. But what do I know? I thought I saw Mamoru Oshii on the way to the convenience store the other day, his International Space Station T-shirt tucked into his pants. Perhaps there were flakes of pie crust on it.

The last time I saw Junko, we went to Sunshine City Mall in Ikebokuro together. We were admiring the sad and noble animals in the aquariums and zoos there when a major earthquake hit. I half expect something as dramatic to happen here and now, but we are spared a natural disaster ("Fuck it. It's Sunday," a tectonic plate deep underneith the Pacific Ocean sighs).

Instead, Kichijoji is sweet and kind to us. There’s a store in Parco where Junko buys a complete set of candy toys, miniature household items from France. There’s also a little roof garden we find at Isetan, with Astroturf instead of real grass and little boxes of flowers lined up like coffins. A lone oyaji sits on a bench by himself, face buried in a tiny paperback. The sky overhead is a rusty summer red.

Someday, all this will be gone.  And so, for the sake of preservation, Junko takes some pictures, remembering the roof gardens that no longer grace Tokyo.

“There was one in Ikebokuro. It had a huge tree house and a waterfall. It was so amazing.”

I insist she go to the one at the Fairmont in San Francisco, still my favorite. She tells me about the  nearby Yuzawa-ya store, and what sounds like an amazing roof garden there. “There’s a huge race track, where boys play with RC cars.”

A week ago, I’m sitting with a wild-eyed Clive in Asagaya. In between insulting the owner of the restaurant we’re in, (“He’s from Newcastle, for fuck’s sake. Where do you suppose he learned his culinary skills? At a building site?”) he rants about how Japan is a third world country, and how no one will admit to or even knows it. Everyone lives in a rabbit hole, he says, emerging only to eat dango and feed the carps in the park. They buy designer brand clothing and plasma TVs. They live out miserable lives in tiny apartments, work themselves to death, and how it's up to draft beer to bring us any comfort.

Only bottles are served at Anna Miller's. But the unexplainable sadness and ennui that always manages to leak into Sunday afternoons takes over anyways. Maybe you felt it too. At the bottom of your brand coffee at the secret Showa café, on the toy shelves at the children’s floor at the department store, and on those long escalator rides to the top of the building bumping into other weekend shoppers like yourself along the way.

We tried to go to the zoo at Inokashira park, but they closed the gates at 4 pm.

I guess this is where I live now.

Comments

[Geoff Tebbetts]

Ah, yes. Anna Miller's. Someday, a few centuries from now, the Anna Miller's uniform will be seen as the geisha outfit of the late 20th century, where waitresses serve you breakfast with a flip of the skirt and a smile, instead of the pluck of a shamisen and a serving from a sake bottle.

Anime and manga hasn't been deaf and dumb to the gratuitous Anna Miller uniform. The main characters in Variable Geo and Your & My Secret work for Hanna Miller's and Anna Milner's, respectively, while Excel Excel herself has come across Kansai-ben-speaking waitresses in similar garb. If production companies weren't so caught up in dressing their characters in maid outfits, they'd be firing spoofs of the restaurant at us like volleys of machine-gun ammo.

I myself prefer a good CoCo's. Doraemon and super-hot curry is hard to beat.

[Carl Horn]

When I was sixteen I would have had no interest in going into Anmira. I knew there were some in Tokyo, but I also knew back home the chain had Amish-country roots and the motto "Kissin' Wears Out, Cookin' Don't"--neither of which seemed primed to inspire sexual thoughts, and I hadn't come all the way to Japan to sample some oh-so-wacky take on American baking culture. On the contrary, I had come here to shove coins into sake vending machines, an act that would make me a criminal on two continents.

On the cosmic scale, today is the solstice. About sixty miles up the river from here is a 1/1 model of Stonehenge built by a mad lawyer long ago as a memorial to the dead of World War One. Of the two million Americans who fought in it, perhaps twenty veterans total might survive to visit. Today, is, of course, given over to the more modest slaughters of the pagans (several thousand survive locally alone--there is a Portland prog-rock band named Solar Druid) who converge on the poured concrete triliths, but I think I will beat the rush and wait until next weekend to drop by. I have a trick in mind where I bring my own keystone, and with careful placement can make it the solstice any time.

I explain the sadness of Sunday afternoons by pointing out that this is the day when the Lord rested from his labors, leaving the job unfinished.

[slasher]

Third world country my ass.
Perhaps we are living in a high-tech rabbit hole.
But it's much better than living in a shitty trailer like this Clive guy does.
Plus, if it's a third world country, why do you keep buying cars and electric devices from us? In fact, our products including cars are made of wood and stone, sometimes paper, because we lack resources. It's a poor, miserable, and pathetic country we live in. So why don't you spare me a dime?

[fko3]

Never star Ann-mila Costumes!
It's idolatry!Too Bad.

To replace, star and pray my Golden Cow.

;)