Over the weekend I took a trip into Tokyo to meet some friends from the States who were in Japan for the first time. We had fun, doing touristy stuff like visiting the 1300 year old Buddhist temple at Asakusa and sampling Japanese izakaya food. All gaijin love Akihabara, so I showed them some of the more interesting shops there, and we had fun exploring and buying various stuff. I wanted to take them to a maid cafe, so we walked along the main road where cute girls in outrageous maid costumes (complete with “Absolute Zone” over-knee socks and skirts) handed out pamphlets advertising the shops they worked at. The maid cafe idea has been around for more than a decade by now, and there are quite a few variations available. For example, there was a Dracula-themed maid cafe with Gothic Lolita style maids, a Tsundere cafe with girls that insult you then act sweet to you as you leave, and even an ashi-fumi massage parlor where a Japanese maid will walk on your back. One I’d like to try is an ear-cleaning maid cafe in which you rest your head on the lap of a pretty girl (which is called hiza-makura or “knee-pillow”) while she cleans your ears with a traditional mimikaki ear cleaner. Fun!
Having your ears cleaned by a pretty girl is big in Japan.
