Cosplaying Akihabara girls have their eyes on your wallets (and your earwax)
Kimono-clad babes offering their knees as pillows as they carve the wax out of customers’ ear holes is the latest hot fad to hit Akihabara, the Tokyo district best known for its maid-loving geeks and gizmo fans, according to Shukan Asahi (3/9).
Yamamoto Mimi Kaki-ten’s only service is to clean its customers’ ears, with the job performed by sexy young women kneeling on the floor and clad only in summer kimono known as yukata.
Each ear-cleaning session lasts 30 minutes and costs 2,500 yen.
“It’s the ultimate therapy obtained through touching and petting,” Shukan Asahi quotes the company’s promotional pamphlet as saying.
Yamamoto Mimi Kaki-ten’s maidens give the weekly an earful about the service’s past.
“We had no idea it’d be a success. We get more customers from among ordinary salarymen than we do from among the otaku,” one of the employees says. “Our girls have got to kneel down the whole time they’re working, so it’s a pretty tough job.”
Akihabara has recently become saturated with “maid” services. Those with a yen for foot massages (and, yes, it is in the same ballpark), eye-glasses and even hairdos can go to Akihabara and get what they want provided by a maid, or at least a pretty young woman decked out in a saucy French maid’s uniform.
Yamamoto Mimi Kiki-ten is believed to be an extension of the maid fad that has seen a sudden boom in popularity within the district for “themed” women; like those wearing kimono similar to types favored by waitresses in the 1920s, women who wear cat’s ears and women pretending to be men’s older sisters. In the same building as the Yamamoto Mimi Kaki-ten, there’s even another store staffed entirely by women dressed up as men, but made to look like the effeminate types portrayed by the famous Takarazuka cross-dressing revue.
Economist Takuro Morinaga says the dress-ups have arisen from a deeper, darker past.
“Maid cafes originally sprung up from a role-playing game where customers were looked after by a maid character who referred to them as ‘master’ (a practice common among the maid cafes). Maids became the object of otaku dreams,” Morinaga tells Shukan Asahi. “Now that the maid business has firmly established itself, its attentions are going to be turned toward using maids to snare tourists’ money.” (By Ryann Connell)
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