Japan 2006, Part 4

Day 4

Day 4 started with a beautiful morning over the fantastic view. I took more pictures of daytime Yokohama from my window. Also, I forgot to mention that when I step outside a room, there's a window across from me with another terrific view! After going through our morning grooming, us 4 headed downstairs to eat some lunch. I say lunch because we didn't want to get on the train anytime in the morning because of work rush hours. Rush hours on the trains here are really bad. Imagine the worst New York traffic jam, multiply the people by 100 and stick them on a train that seats maybe 40 at most per car. We were aiming late morning/early afternoon to even attempt to ride the train. The restaurant we went to was located in the lobby of the hotel. It was a very classy, upscale place, I felt almost underdressed to be inside. The theme of the restaurant was Oktoberfest, so they had lots of food from Germany. For a buffet style serving, the food was extremely good! I found myself stuffing my plate with various sausages, eggs, etc, etc. After spending $28 we headed out to the train station and headed to the otaku capital, Akihabara.
The plan was to meet someone from the city's tourism department at 2:30 to take us around town. We got there around 2pm and walked around the station for a little bit, but I think we spent too long because the guide never came or we missed the group. Not wanting the minor setback to get to us, we decided to walk around to see the town for ourselves. About an hour into walking, we were getting tired of not knowing where we were. Finally, we took out our map, grabbed our bearings and decided to hit the closest electronic store. However, luck was on our side because a bi-lingual reporter came up to us and wanted to know if we could accompany her to a maid cafe for a story. Now, maid cafes are pretty localized here in Japan, specifically in Akihabara. I won't get into the details, so it's easier to Google it or something. Her name is Sachiko and was a reporter for a paper that accommodated to Japanese people learning English. Anyways, she offered to do all our translating and actually showing us to a maid cafe.
The maid cafe we went to was called Cafe Doll. They hired girls to dress up in anime maid costumes and serve customers. "They do everything they can to create a homey atmosphere" Saichiko explained as she was telling us the details on what the purpose of a maid cafe was. To give you an example of what the experience was like: When we first made our way into the shop, the girls said something like "Welcome back home, master", which kind of freaked me out at first. Also, when they served your drink, if you had anything that needed to be added to it, they'd do it for you. It was a little overwhelming for me with the high pitched voices, the outfits, and the crazy lines. It almost bordered pedophilia. However, these kinds of shops are very common in Japan. Saichiko continued talking about how other maid cafes even had other services including hair salons and foot massages. Some cafes are so successful that you have to wait 90 minutes or more just to get a seat. These cafes usually had a waiting room where you can buy trading cards, towels, post cards of their favorite maids. This particular one we went to had notebooks each of the maids kept. In these books, customers would write comments like "did you watch this anime" or "what did you think of this manga". Surprisingly, the topics don't get vulgar at all. Some notebooks had the same 3 or 4 people write in them. The maids themselves reply in these notebooks and it looks like they're actually having an on-going correspondence. Another common, yet very successful practice is to charge money to take pictures with any maid you like for $3. Roy got 3 pictures taken while the rest of us got 1. It came out really nice, but I don’t' think I'll be seeing this in the states anytime soon. Sachiko asked some questions regarding what we thought of it and if we would go to places like this regularly. I told her that this kind of service would affect people depending on how they were raised. If you were raised to be somewhat conservative, you might find these kinds of businesses outrageous and ridiculous. Some would be more accepting to the fact if they knew the culture behind it. Also, for myself, I would visit because the service was great, a real different experience. The girls weren't bad to look at either (yes, I asked, or they don't hire people from high school, so they were all college students).
After the cafe, Saichiko thanked us and offered to take us to the biggest store in town. This store was called Ishiharu? and had eight floors of stuff. She recommended for us to head to the 4th floor because Hugh mentioned something about getting gundam figures. She was very right! The minute we stepped into the floor, we were overwhelmed with figures. Any figure from any anime you can think of was there. There were sizes ranging from tiny key chains to lifelike statues. Price ranges were from $10-$3000. We spent a good 2 hours just walking around looking at the figures themselves. I wanted to find a certain book while I was in Japan, so I went down to their bookstore on the 3rd floor. For all you hentai/ecchi fans, this bookstore is your heaven. It got so graphic that I felt guilty walking down the book aisle, need to go there tomorrow....Anyways we explored the other floors which basically consisted of various electronics and gadgets. I ended up spending $80 buying a stuffed animal and a figurine...need to go there tomorrow...If we have a chance to head back in that direction, I'm going to go back to the morning musume section and raid it clean. It was already getting late, so we wandered around the streets a little more before heading back to the station to return to our hotel.
Akihabara is a very nice place to go to if you're into electronics and anime. It's a Mecca for all the otakus! Everything there caught my eyes, the stores, the cosplayers, the tall buildings, everything! I know that when I get a chance to come back to Japan, Akihabara will be definitely on the check list.