Maid cafe

Ah, the maid cafe - a uniquely Japanese innovation (I hope) and a particularly famous feature of Akihabara, the geek mecca. The idea is that you pay a little extra to be waited on by cute girls dressed as maids. The cafes range from subdued - really like a normal cafe except that the girls happen to be in costume - to weird - where they girls fuss over you, act 'moe' (…look it up) and play games with the customers. I've been to a 'normal' maid cafe before, but I just had to see what the other sort might be like.

The elevator door opened to a cutesy, brightly decorated cafe with a stage (where the maids sometimes do a show at set hours), pictures on the walls showing us this cafe's girls, and, of course the girls themselves.  They greeted me with a wildly excited 'okaerinasai!' ('welcome home!') and called me 'ojousama' - I'm the lady of the house, you see, and they were welcoming me like good maids.

There were a few other customers, mostly male and all Japanese, and the different maids chatted with the different tables, or to each other. When customers ordered food or drink, the maid delivering it would have the customer play a little game with them (like, chant some cute phrase before eating) before leaving them to consume it.

The aim of the maids is to spend time with the customers, and make them feel special by joking and asking questions and being cute. They were quite good at this, but I still felt uncomfortable. It's just kind of an embarrassing atmosphere; perhaps it would be better if the cafe were absolutely full of customers and all of them well into their cups, so that there was a loud and cheery atmosphere. I ended up feeling a bit sorry for the girls, because who wants to try to josh along and play cute games with reticent guys who can hardly look you in the eye? I felt vaguely as if I were seeing a new type of geisha, in the sense that their job is to look pretty and chat with customers, no matter how little the customers have to say.

A maid cafe is a little different from a normal cafe; with their gimmicks, they get a bit of extra money out of you. When I went (Tuesday evening), these were the rules:

• There's a table charge - for 1000 yen you can stay two hours. 
•  You must order either a 'set menu', or choose a minimum of two items from the normal menu. These 'set menus', each of them over 2000 yen, included food and drink, as well as maid-related things - like a keychain, a photo opportunity, etc. 
•  You can't take photos of the maids, unless you have paid for the privilege. You can also buy merchandise with the maids' pictures on it - hence why they don't want you to take your own! As 

I've been to Akiba several times, I felt I really had to try a real maid cafe, just for the unique experience. My conclusion: it was a bit too weird for me. Not just for me, I daresay - to my amusement, several times, another foreigner or group of foreigners would come up the elevator, and the doors would open - they'd take one look into the room, pale, and immediately go back downstairs again. If you go, you should go with at least a couple of friends who have a good sense of humour, I think!