Simon Lewis: Comrade Hack

The gimmick at ‘maid cafes’ is teenage waitresses in frilly French maid outfits with bunny ears and bloomers. When they bring you your drink they say ‘I send my love into this cup! My love makes your coffee taste better!’ and make a heart sign with their hands, and beam it at your cup, and you’re supposed to make the same gesture, though C and I didn’t understand and just sat there grinning.

For 500Y, (about two quid), you can hire a maid to play kiddie games with – stuff like Buckaroo and Kerplunk – and more than one impressionable young lad was being artfully separated from his pocket money.

Yet although it might sound like ‘my first hostess bar’ it wasn’t sleazy; about a third of the customers were girls, and sitting next to C and myself was a couple with their toddler. A girl sitting on her own in a kimono was, we assumed, the mamasan figure, such was her quiet air of belonging, but no; she paid and left, leaving us to speculate what the deal with her was.

There were more girls in the maid cafe than in the streets around. We were in Akihabara, the district in Tokyo where the ‘Otaku’, or Japanese geeks, hang out. The hectic multi-story shops are crammed with electronics, porn, and comics, alongside Kurt Cobain talking action figures and the like.

Dressing up and fantasy are a big part of Japanese leisure. Certain streets are famous for ‘cos-play kids’; teenagers who dress up and parade around showing off to each other and to photographers. Recent popular looks include ‘medical fetish’ – bloody surgeons gowns, stethoscopes and facemasks combined with miniskirts, pigtails and so on – and Maoist guerilla chic.

It’s a mystery how most of these fashions originate, though I did hear the story of one – a few years ago a craze for ‘Dance Dance Revolution’ (kind of like that electric game ‘Simon’ but with your feet, so knackering) swept through the game arcades. The girls who played it needed to wear something comfortable to chill down in, so started turning up to the arcades in kid’s slumberwear – and that developed into a fashion for wearing fuzzy animal costumes.

We went to Harajuku to spot some crazy fashionistas but only saw a few goths. They all had suitcases, so presumably they got changed when they got there – it was all show, not lifestyle.

More dressing up was in evidence at ‘Lock Up’, a dungeon-themed restaurant. The waitress handcuffs you then leads you to your table in a faux-prison cell. The cocktails come as a rack of test tubes with a mixing glass, or in a fat hypodermic. At one point they turned the lights down and staff ran round dressed as ghosts and demons while a siren wailed.

Japan without a Japanese person to show you around is as bewildering as it is exotic. There is a correct way of doing just about everything – these shoes are only to wear in the toilet, pay at the counter get a ticket then give it to the chef, no you have to shower before you get into the bath, etc, etc. Even getting served in a restaurant is not easy as there’s rarely an English menu. There are no street signs or numbers – how the postal system works is a mystery.

It’s quite common to see a bank of switches and not have a clue what any of them does: in the capsule hotel – ‘that’s for the TV, now how do I change the channel?’ in the bath – ‘that must be the temperature, but how do I run more water? Oh, a mini TV has come on! Why is that light flashing?’ even in the toilet – ‘How do I flush? What does this switch with a picture of a bum on it mean? Ah, a plastic arm has extended and is giving me a robot bidet! Now how do I turn it off? No! Make it stop, it’s going everywhere…’

C and I spent most of our time hanging around in Shibuya, which is like Piccadily Circus, but bigger and more concentrated; the crowds denser, the neon more numerous. The shops are smaller yet with much more stuff in – a fat person would find it impossible to get around inside, fortunately there aren’t any. Everyone is young, fashionable, immaculately made up, busy. Outside the station is the world’s largest pedestrian crossing, where sheer weight of numbers has turned the banal act of getting across the road into spectacle; it’s like watching a tide go in and out.

We played a lot of video games – Virtual Fighter, House of the Dead – in Sega World, and, when Noe turned up, got our picture taken in photo booths, where they print little cartoons around the image – very kawaii (super cute) – and got taken out for a proper dinner.