Maid War Three: @home Cafe

The room is white, spotless, and smells like maids. It looks like the entrance for a ride at Disneyland or a spaceport for a rocket to a maid-populated moon. People sit in church-like pews watching pre-taped maid antics on a plasma TV or browse through seemingly endless amounts of maid merchandise. Maids stand behind the reception desk, make notes in maid schedule books, and pause to robotically shout out numbers into a maid microphone. One by one, the customers depart for the upper-floors, and packs of new people come through the door to take their place.

This is the lobby for Akihabara’s oldest, and judging by the looks of things, single most popular maid establishment, @home Cafe.

Eventually, they call out the number for our little crew. The holy trinity of director, soundman, and cameraman scout out the mysterious upper floor where I am told I will have to “play games with a maid” as the cameras roll.

@home Cafe itself is staffed by “fantasy maids” in brown uniforms that owe little to the Victorian and French tradition. The customers are surprisingly stylish looking young men; a bit like those surfers I saw outside of Meicure. About ten of them sit in the back huffing cigarettes and cracking jokes. I only count about three or four textbook otaku sitting by themselves, lost in some private reverie. All chairs face forward to a stage where god only knows what is going happen.

The music on the hi-fi is pretty amazing. Super Moe Pop sung by the in-house band Kanzen Maid-Sengen. The sugar-sweet songs, performed by the staff, all seem to say the word “goshujin-sama” (“master”) at least one million times per turn.

They seat me at a counter down font, right next to a gorgeous hime gal (“rich princess type” think Paris Hilton goes Cinderella) with bouffant hair who is having some gooey ice cream dessert with her mom. Other perfectly normal looking women are dotted throughout the restaurant, all beaming with smiles. Apparently, everyone wants to be called “master” these days.

I am presented with my maid. She is a perky and toothy little thing wearing gold-rimmed glasses that do not have any lenses, which is so dysfunctional that it induces moe on the astral level.

I calmly inform her that she is not my maid. Rather, she is my enemy. I am going to wipe the floor with her at whatever silly game we wind up playing. No fucking way am I going to lose to Miss Megane Moe on worldwide television.

We play the Wani Wani Panic game. Imagine a goofy plastic alligator head filled with tombstone-like teeth. The maid and I take turns pressing the teeth down Russian Roulette style until the jaw snaps on her dainty hand and she makes appropriate squeaky little noises.

The Hime Gal and her mom firmly have their backs to us the whole time. They don’t want any part of this.

Glasses vanishes for a while, and then reappears on stage with another maid. They lead the entire cafe into a rousing game of Rock, Paper, Scissors. They sing in unison "@home, moe moe, jan, ken, pon!" The camera zooms in on my face.

I briefly and seriously contemplate jumping out the window to my right. I see myself falling seven stories down to my death, and my splattering brains hitting both used computer parts and a vending machine selling instant oden. There really is nowhere else to go from here. Plus, imagine what a gaijin otaku suicide in a maid cafe would do for the sales of my book!

Instead, I calmly wait for the maid to bring me my chow. It turns out to be a heart shaped hamburger (framed by angel's wings made out of mayonaise) and bunny ear cheesecake that the cameraman eagerly eats up after he takes his close-up.

I’m told later that what makes the food here so special is that “the maid puts her moe into it.” Make of that what you will.

@home Cafe Notes:
An over-the-top maid cafe experience worthy of Las Vegas. The girls here aren’t so much “maids” as performers in a kind of Anna Millers/Hooters theme restaurant. Everything, including the audience participation and use of the word “master” is helpfully amplified to the point that even the dumbest customer will “get it.” While this may be great fun for the straight folks, a real otaku, in search of the calming and healing properties that maids sometime provide, might be better served by a place that’s more, I dunno, quiet?

@home Cafe ranking by the book Housemaid Cafe Complete Guide:
Game: 60%
Girls: 30%
Healing: 10%

Bonus Reversal:
The @home maids blog about some weird gaijin that talked about moe, said "hisashiburi," and barely touched his hamburger.

Comments

[Daryl Surat]

"I briefly and seriously contemplate jumping out the window to my right. I see myself falling seven stories down to my death, and my splattering brains hitting both used computer parts and a vending machine selling instant oden. There really is nowhere else to go from here."

It was this line more than any other that reminded me of the prose stylings within the Japan travelogue of a friend of mine over at http://unamerican.livejournal.com/50609.html#cutid1 . I keep trying to get him to read this site, but he keeps being distracted by his discoveries, what with being the first human to observe the thoughtbird and give clown pistols their name and all.

It's a good thing that The Great Life Challenge we had proposed among ourselves never officially got underway, since no matter who among us would walk away with the Life Mastery crown, we'd still have to know in our hearts that Patrick Macias commands greater understanding of The Joke than we.

In my mind, the Wani Wani Panic match played out like the Russian Roulette bit in The Deer Hunter.

[Patrick Macias]

Geoff,

The only numbness occurring occassionally in my life these days is the one in my feet.

[Steve Harrison]

I expect Patrick to be living twice. First getting paid by NHK to eudure Maid Jigoku, then being able to write of the horrors in his next book.

Oh, come on, "What I did to survive in Neo-Tokio" would be a perfect book for the American fandom. shake up a few pre-conceptions and scare some otaku straight. Tamba-san would approve.

me, I figure I'd end up like that guy in Leon, popping capsules under my nose to keep me going....

[danno]

In this whole Master and Servant fantasy are you given a 'safe word' for when the role playing gets out of hand? These Maid Cafes seem like they're a step away from S&M Bondage nightclubs...

[Carl Horn]

The safe word is "I'm out of money."

[PhilHarnish]

Thought you might get a kick out of this: http://omomani.blog53.fc2.com/blog-entry-1522.html

Some more gaijin/maid cafe action.

[toshi]

I went to @home cafe. The wait to sit down was over and hour. They wouldn't stop playing the same song over the speaker. The maids did not say goshujinsama to me. They took forever to present me with my bill. If I was supposed to wait so long, they could have offered me more coffee. I really felt like screaming.

The food was good though, and the maids were nice.