Maid in Japan

Home again. And missing Tokyo already. It's the greatest city in the world, the fastest, craziest, most fashionable, and most polite. Sure, there are problems. Where aren't there? I'd just rather be there than anywhere.I learned so many things during my stay, which was a blizzard of new media and alternative education and great conversations with and about youth in East Asia and beyond. I hope to blog about some of the many things I learned about Korea, China, Hong Kong, and Japan over the next few days and, when I'm beyond this crazy jetlag, will upload some snapshots too. In the meantime, before I drag myself into the office for a business day (after about 26 hours of travel, door to door . . . but, hey!, no complaints: we were bumped to business class from Tokyo to Dallas so the long delay in Dallas was just redressing the karma imbalance), I want to make a few remarks on the so-called Otako, the youth of Japan who are so obsessed with media and the internet that, supposedly, they stay in their houses (ie. their parents' houses) all day and just live on line, with no other life beyond that. They live in internet cafes too, says the media. What we learned from one of the papers was that, in fact, the internet cafes are an alternative to homelessness for many Japanese youth who cannot find jobs in post-bubble Japan. For 1000 yen a night, you get a chair and a terminal and can stay as long as you want. They're open 24 hours a day. Patrick, in his orange wig, also led a tour to Akihibara, the electronics capital of Tokyo if not the world. This is also where lots of Otaku kids hang out, often dressed in High Costume, Japanese style, which is the highest of all high costumery. One place the kids go are the Maid Cafes. At these cafes, other kids work as waitresses, dressed up in maid costumes, and obsequiously wait upon the patrons, in the most submissive ways. It's high camp but also touching. All the rhetoric in Japanese society is to despise these lazy, zoned-out, internet-crazed kids, but, at the Maid Cafes, they are honored and treated as upperclass society is treated by its servants. And the servants, in turn, are doing this both as a job and as fashion, as theater, as play--its own kind of expressive and performative power. It is fascinating to think about the complex and intertwineed relationship of high-tech Japan, fashion Japan, slacker (Otaku) Japan, recession Japan, and these Maid Cafes. At the Pecha Kucha at Super Deluxe (named the best avant garde arts space in Asia by one of the travel glossies last year), Patrick reappeared with fifteen or so of the maids, most but not all men in drag, all of them lively and fun and in costumes that would have made the downstairs maids in any British nineteenth-century drama green with envy. Totally wired, totally networked, and totally crinolined too. Maid in Japan. Inimitable. Always. [Photo below is courtesy of Flickr Creative Commons, made public by photographer Todd Horner. Thanks,Todd._decorate

This one is thanks to OiMax:

And more photographs available with a CC license, this one from Jenny Webber. It is from Harajuku (very fashionable area) rather than Akihibara but a great example of Japanese youth high