The Road Less Traveled

Tokyo, Comic Market, and New Years – Day 4: Did you say “Maid” Café?

Monday, February 2nd, 2009 by Rintaun | Uncategorized

Well I just woke up and I realized that I forgot to write a post yesterday, so I have officially ruined my streak of writing about Tokyo every day until I’m done. That is pretty lame. Oh well, I only have two more posts now, including this one.

So it was finally the last day of Comic Market, and like the first day, I went to it not really wanting anything, and not really getting anything either. I had pretty much bought everything I wanted on day 2 of the convention, which is good, because I certainly spent enough doing it.

Each day of Comic Market, the different halls are organized by theme, so if a group you know is in one area, pretty much the surrounding area is going to be similarly themed groups. And more than that, the convention overall tends to have themes each day. The first day, put extremely generally, is anime and manga. That’s Japanese cartoons and comics, respectively, for those not in the know. The second day is basically games, music, and software. And finally, the third day is… porn. Okay, really, you can buy any of those things on any days (though you’ll have to search pretty hard; each group selling is generally only there on one day), but those categories I gave represent the large majority of the items being sold.

One thing I’ve found out since being here in Japan is that their attitude toward pornography is very different than in the United States. In Japan there is a law regarding obscene materials, which basically just says “You can’t sell, or possess with intent to sell, obscene materials.” It doesn’t define what is obscene, however, and so over the years this has just come to mean that you don’t show genitalia. That’s right, 100% of Japanese porn is censored. Of course, that means it’s not obscene, and so you go into a convenience store or a book/game store or a movie store and a lot of the time, the pornography section is just sitting out in the open, usually right next to non-pornographic material — and while purchasing it is in theory restricted to people over 18 years of age (why it’s not 20, the Japanese age of majority, I don’t know), anybody under that age could potentially browse through it to their heart’s content.

Of course, that’s not a perfect description of the situation, either. A lot of stores do separate it into a different section, usually blocked off by a curtain that says “18 and up” (only in Japanese) in big imposing letters. So now with that explained in way too many words, I return to the story where we left off.

So the third day of Comic Market was mostly porn, which made it difficult to find anything that I was interested in. Mike had quite a few groups he wanted to visit, so we got up, ate breakfast, and left. We ended up getting their earlier than we had any other day, and we were further up in the line. However, we ended up getting in the convention center, if I recall correctly, even later than we had on the second day of the convention.

So to sum up that day, I ended up finishing the book I brought with me, and then waited for Mike to get done. After that we went back to the hotel, maybe around 1pm. I took a short nap while Mike showered (these were surprisingly warm winter days, so he was sweating quite a bit — luckily, I don’t sweat very much).

It was December 30th, and it was Mike’s birthday. He decided that he wanted to go back to Akihabara again and go to what is called a maid café. Maid cafés have gotten popular in Akihabara in the past couple years, and they’re basically exactly what the name implies: a café where the waitresses are dressed up like maids. He wanted to go to one once to see what it was like, and so we did.

We ended up going to one called Mai:lish, and it was surprisingly normal. I mean, except for the strange customers (the worst part of the experience by far), the maid waitresses, and the extremely formal language the waitresses used that made them difficult to understand. Other than that, it was basically a normal café, albeit a bit expensive.

I don’t remember what all we did in Akihabara after the maid café. Whatever it was, it was pretty inconsequential, and I want to save my detailed description of Akihabara for my next post, because we go back their on the last day of our trip.

Well, this one was a bit shorter… sorry about that, but I didn’t really do much on that day, so I guess that means I didn’t have much to say about it. However, the book I was reading (and finished, leaving me with no reading material for the rest of the trip), “The Well of Ascension” by Brandon Sanderson, was amazing. When I got back to the dorm, I got out and read through the next (and final) book in the series, “The Hero of Ages” very quickly, and it was amazing, too.

Okay, I guess that’s enough filler. Stay tuned for the conclusion to our suspenseful tale! (hah)

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