Schoolboys at your service
Thanks to reader Ohmiya for sending me this story from Reuters. It is about Yaoi boys, now in theme cafes in Japan.
TOKYO (Reuters) - At Edelstein boarding school, the schoolboys wear lip-gloss, the headmistress has a weakness for homoerotic comic books, and there is only one subject: how to serve female visitors.
Welcome to Tokyo’s first schoolboy cafe, the latest in a flurry of eateries in Japan where customers and waiters role play themes from manga comics.
In keeping with the schoolboy theme, waiters with manicured hands and soft voices pretend to be teenage students, chatting and flirting with well-dressed Japanese women playing the roles of benefactresses visiting the school.
On a Saturday in January, the cafe, which opened late last year, was packed with giggling customers.
“Most of our customers are office ladies in their twenties and thirties, women who are fashionable but normal,” said Emiko Sakamaki, Edelstein’s 27-year-old manager, herself dressed in a loose mini-dress over skinny jeans and knee-high boots.
Edelstein is based on one of Sakamaki’s favorite comic books, a 1970s cult classic about romance at a German school.
Its visitors are united by a passion for such “boy-love manga”, or comics about boy-boy romance for female readers — a genre that is currently undergoing a huge revival in Japan.
Most boy-love manga feature dreamy, feminine-looking male characters. The same beauty ideal guides Sakamaki when she selects the waiters who talk about their pretend homework and studies at Edelstein.
“I’m in the flower arrangement club,” whispers one girlish, long-haired waiter at the cafe, looking up from the book of German poetry he is reading.
RACY BOY-LOVE
Role-play cafes for men have long been popular in Tokyo. Most revolve around waitresses dressed as French maids and target “otaku” — geeky fans of comics and animation movies.
One of the reasons that role-play and dressing up are so popular in Japan is that they allow people to briefly escape the extreme social control and rigid norms of everyday life, anthropologists say.
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The complete article and more photos here:
http://uk.reuters.com/article/oddlyEnoughNews/idUKT30561220080229
Tags: boy cafe, Edelstein, Japan, yaoi
March 2nd, 2008 at 6:43 pm
I would love someone to try to explain this to middle America.
March 2nd, 2008 at 8:24 pm
Explain this to middle America?!
It’s a bunch of moral preversion, is what it is. Somehow you just don’t get it: God said it, I believe it, and that settles it!
And, most particularly, the Great Sky Man declared that love ONLY occurs between people of different sexes! Anyone who thinks differently is going straight to Hell.
(Or to Thailand!)
March 2nd, 2008 at 9:14 pm
There are no dirty white men in this, so Middle Farangland will not be interested.
March 2nd, 2008 at 11:54 pm
very strange indead…i guess thats why it appeals to me
March 3rd, 2008 at 12:36 am
…unless they are up for spreading their moral enlightenment in a new crusade that is…
March 3rd, 2008 at 5:48 pm
“The Japanese are the most sexually perverse nation in the world. Discuss (with examples of course).”
March 4th, 2008 at 4:29 am
glasperlenspieler:
“unless they [Middle America] are up for spreading their moral enlightenment in a new crusade that is”
umm… Middle America, crusades? What Euro history lesson did I miss?