Akihabara

There's one more blog you probably haven't read below this one. Go read it if you're into being linear.

"It's almost after midnight
I can see the city lights, we're here."

At 10:30am last Tuesday, I was due to meet Diana Garnett, Atsushi Kurogi, and a very intimidating Yohei Kato at the Electric City exit of the Akihabara station. I left my apartment maybe an hour in advance, and still managed to be 10 minutes late. Normally I wouldn't have cared, but seeing as how I am more that slightly attracted to a particular member of the party, I immediately went into severely apologetic Japanese person mode, which probably made things more awkward than they should have been. If I wanted to go on about the mind-numbingly tense attraction and severe social ineptitude, it would make for pages and pages of quasi-entertaining reading which will probably come later, but, not now.

Upon exiting the station, the effect my senses experienced was similar to those that Leeloo underwent when she de-boarded the rocketship to Floston Paradise. Tall buildings stretched for miles, tightly packed together to create only enough space for thousands of Otaku to cram through. The building signs flashed and rotated, stacked up on top of each other to advertise the special products each floor offered. Hundreds of small buildings and street vendors lined the streets, beckoning people in to buy their porn, costumes, giant rotating beef on a stick. Happy hardcore rave music spilled out into the streets from small shops, adorable women in maid costumes waving signs and singing into microphones, their powers of cuteness luring the susceptible passersby into taking their coupons, submitting to their smiles, and buying thousands of yen worth of electronics and sweet strawberry shortcakes. Street vendors yelled at the public to buy their electronic accessories; thousands of meters of cables of every thickness and calibre wrapped around giant spools, LAN cables of every length and color, every converter cable you could ever dream of having. The tart smell of crepes wafted by as girls in costume danced in synchronized hand-waving patterns, advertising their cafe. The latest anime debut played on a wall of stacked screens outside of a DVD shop, accompanied by its hyperactive techno theme song. My head spun. 10:45am, and my mind had gone numb from the sensory overload.

Despite Yohei's strong insistence against the matter, our first stop was Atsushi's favorite maid cafe....the name of which I currently fail to remember. After getting up to the 6th floor, we were told to wait a moment. The four of us stood in the foyer of the entrance. If one has never experienced silence like smooth glass and enough awkwardness to kill a herd of wild caribou, now is the time for one to experience such. We gratefully accepted the first maid's invitation as she waved us inside. We were greeted by a room full of adorable young women in frilly maid costumes, donning bonnets, aprons, and dazzling smiles. "Irrasshaimase!!" they shouted in unison, their high-pitched voices sending a shiver of cuteness down my spine. Our maid led us to our table, her perfect curls bouncing with each giddy step. Upon sitting us down, she handed us some adorable menus, both in English and Japanese, and began to rattle off a string of specials and features in a high, syrupy voice that I could hardly understand at all. I caught words like "tea", "cake", "lunch", and "adorable", but beyond that I was mostly just dazzled by her ridiculous adorable outfit and the fact that I was in a big room full of bubbly maids. I ordered some kind of juice, probably, and she ran off to tend to other customers. Every five minutes, a new party of costumers would arrive, and the cuteness level would raise to an uncomfortably high level as they were greeting in unison by maids and led off to their table. The place filled up fast, and our maid brought us our drinks. She gave a speech to us about how much cuter our orders would taste if we put our hands together in the shape of hearts and said "Moe, moe, kyuu!" together at the same time. We did, and after we all died of embarrassment a little inside, my orange juice tasted just that much cuter. Yohei ordered tea that came in an adorable filigreed pot, and instead of the "say when," instruction usually given by servers, he was to say "Nyan~!" when he wanted her to stop pouring. His eye twitched as the tea came perilously close to the edge the cup. "....Nyan," he breathed expressionlessly, as the maid bounced up and down and stopped pouring. I nearly had a hernia I was laughing so hard. 

Throughout the hour or so we were there, there were various birthday announcements and celebrations and free slices of adorable cake for those who were lucky enough to visit the cafe on their birthday. Birthday participants got their pictures taken with the group of 10 or so maids, and were publicly embarrassed as the maids walked around them and make remarks about their cuteness. We stayed and drank our drinks, making small talk and stupid jokes, watching the women bounce back and forth and get paid to flirt with oversized men with backpacks and thick glasses. We waved goodbye to the maids, who all waved back. As soon as the elevator doors slid closed, Diana and I busted up laughing, doubled over with tears running down our faces, unable to breathe.

We walked around for awhile afterward, debating on what to eat. Eventually we came to a small restaurant with menu item advertisements plastered all over the walls. We akwardly ate Sukiyaki and raw fish as rave music and voices from loudspeakers could be heard softly from outside. Walking around, we stumbled upon various hobby shops that were endless levels high, stocked full of every figurine from every Japanese pop culture movement ever in existence. I ogled at foot-high representations of the Gurren Lagann, and drooled at the molded figures from my favorite game, Guilty Gear. Rows and rows of plush Totoros and Ponyos, massive Ghibli replica castles and weapons. It was a nerd's greatest dream. It was an even greater dream, of course, if you could shell out the hundreds of dollars the figurines cost, and the thousands you would have to give up for the large replicas. It was still fun to stare, even if nobody else but me wanted to go to the hentai floors. Someday, someday..... We found a cosplay shop, in which Diana tried on a ridiculously adorable Alice in Wonderland maid costume. Apparently she's going to buy it when we return to Akiba next month.

Soon after we ventured to Yodobashi Camera, an enormous electronics store that will supply you with anything you could ever want as long as there's a switch that will turn it on. At least 10 floors high, I couldn't help but get vertigo going up and down the sets of escalators, the relentless flourescent lights drilling into my eyes and the sounds of beeping and robotic movement coming from every corner of every floor. We looked at cameras, on thousand dollar tripods with features no one would ever need. Exercise machines that essentially just vibrated you, toy robots that blinked and smiled and ran you errands on wheels. I can't remember what our mission was in Yodobashi Camera, but I couldn't get out fast enough. 

You'd think one maid cafe would be enough for the average Akiba visitor. But oh, no. Atsushi, Akihabara master, led us down some strange streets to an unmarked entrance. Upon entering, we were greeted by another maid. But this time, there was no heavy makeup or glitter or excessive frills. She was makeup-less, tousled hair in a messy braid, carrying a thin silver tray. Wondering wtf was going on, I looked around. The wooden tables and chairs were stressed to look old. Customers' shoes creaked on the wooden floorboards as they walked. An old wooden ladder led up to rows and rows of books lining the cafe. It then donned on me that this cafe wasn't modern--in fact, it was reverse modern. It was made up to look like a cafe from the 1700's. Dumbfounded, I followed my party to our table, which had paint chipping and peeling across the top. The tea was endless, so that was exciting. We also got a pamphlet with our cafe experience that I guess detailed that each employee of the cafe was there representing a different character from an old cafe manga. There were a few female characters, and one male. They were identifiable by their brooches. Looking around, I searched for the male employee, and let out a squee of Zuka happiness as I realized that he was very obviously a she. I bubbled to myself silently about my love for crossdressing as we ordered small cakes and split them. I started making weird jokes about the banana sauce, and finally things got a little less awkward. For, like, 5 minutes. Though the effort to make the cafe look throwback was definitely effective, the attempt to match the books to the theme was not. We leafed through a dinosaur pop-up book perplexedly before leaving the cafe.