Musings on Maids

 
I've been thinking about the Maid cafe (see my last entry), as a few people asked me if there was anything, well, pervy about it. As we waited outside the café before we went inside, one of my colleagues, a Japanese man in his forties, confessed to me quite earnestly that his dream was for a Maid to write his name in tomato sauce on his om-rice (not some kind of spiritually pure rice but a favourite Japanese dish of an omelette filled with rice). Hearing this kind of dreamy teenage fantasy from a fully grown man wearing a suit was something between rather sweet, plain pathetic and slightly disturbing. The Maid phenomenon has been criticized for its treatment of women as fetish objects, and before my visit, I had an image of the Maids being like the common fantasy figure of the 'French maid', but inside the café the atmosphere struck me as remarkably sexless. For a start, the customers were not all male, as I'd heard - only half were - and everything, the Maids, the customers' behaviour, the ornaments, the music, the decor, was childish. Extremely childish. It was adults playing at being children. It was regression in a big way, but there was nothing pervy about it. What is more worrying, perhaps, is that our urban societies are creating adults who need to regress to such an extent - emotionally immature and undeveloped adults. Adults who spend their lives working behind a computer screen, or a desk, and who are regimented into being a voiceless, insignificant cog in an overwhelmingly large society, unable to express their opinions and feelings, and unable to develop meaningful adult relationships with the people around them. Who feel more comfortable being children, a state of being which they already know, which is safe, and unthreatening, and undemanding.
Or is it just good fun being a kid again? Is the comfort of regression harmless and even necessary? Japan’s custom of bathing has been compared to the ultimate regression - to the womb. The Japanese bath comforts, rejuvenates and refreshes you. It brings you back to life again. In a society like Japan's, where one has to bear the pressures of work most of the waking hours, and must be 'majime' (serious/earnest) in their work at all times, no wonder people want to wear animal ears and play tea parties in their free time.