Maid cafés are a common sight throughout countless anime shows and manga because they’re common in Japanese culture. For the uninitiated, maid cafes are themed cafes featuring waitresses dressed in maid costumes who call their customers goshujinsama (ご主人様) or ojōsama (お嬢様), meaning master or lady, respectively. Occasionally, okyakusama (お客様), meaning customer will be used as well. The gimmick doesn’t end there though. Maids will draw cute pictures on omurice with ketchup, play games with customers, sing and do dance routines, and generally be as cute as humanly possible, all in the name of customer service.
Though most maid cafes cater predominantly to Japanese customers, there’s at least one maid café that grabs English speaking customers attention, even though most maids aren’t fluent in English. How? A mixture of pertinent English phrases and non-verbal communication. @Home Cafe in Akibahara, Tokyo manages to pull in around 5,000 foreign customers a month. While most of those customers come from other parts of Asia, such as China, Korea, and Thailand, there’s always a steady stream of non-Japanese speaking customers willing to experience the touristy allure of a maid cafe. According to @Home Cafe’s Legendary Maid hitomi:
“I can talk happily because I don’t rely on words alone. For example, I find common topics that can be raised with foreign masters, such as anime… Talking at the word level, the rest will be expressed with gestures, and some masters will not speak English, but if there is a common topic it will be communicated with gestures and facial expressions, you know.”
Finding a topic that’s accessible to both parties and working in non-verbal communication becomes essential to communicating with and serving non-Japanese speaking customers. Japanese is peppered at the end of conversations, to keep in line with customers looking for immersion into Japanese culture. For customers that do know English, the maids at @Home Cafe are provided with English conversation classes as well as an English conversation handbook to help with customer service.
Both the classes and handbooks help with creating common ground between maids and their customers, and with Tokyo’s tireless efforts in making the city as foreigner-friendly as possible before they host the 2020 Olympics, I’d say @Home Cafe is way ahead of the game.
Source: PRESIDENT Online
