Now, I’ve never been one to turn a girl’s head when walking down the street. When I drink a diet coke, office workers don’t rush to the window to watch as I glug down the aspartamed beverage, they don’t even look up from their computer screens. I mean, I’m not hideous, I am not cloaked in a hood and displayed at a freak show, I have a certain charm, but I am comfortable with the fact that I am no Brad Pitt or George Clooney.
There’s an area in Tokyo call Akihabara, it is famous for two things, the electronic and manga shops which line the main drag outside the train station and the maid cafés that line the slightly sleazier streets off the main road. I am not entirely sure what goes on in these maid cafes, (don’t look at me like that, it’s true). I have been led to believe that men go there for company provided by young, Japanese women who are dressed in Benny Hill type costumes. As far as I am aware, it is non-sexual, just companionship; you pay for conversation and to be flattered; it’s an ego massage, but how you must feel afterwards when you realise your wallet is lighter and the girl was faking it is anyone’s guess.
Anyway, time to bring these two threads together. Outside the cafes, the streets are lined with maids; Young women dressed in revealing outfits trying to entice you into their lair. I am not sure if these are the women you will spend time with or if there are hawkers to get you into the bars where other ‘maids’ wait inside. Most of the girls don’t look alluring or enticing, they look young, cold and bored, but I guess a jobs’ a job. Anyway, I walked down the road, taking in this spectacle with a sense of amusement and shame and you might expect that, I, a man, a man on his own, their target audience, would be fighting off the maids trying to engage me, trying to get eye-contact, handing me a leaflet, or talking me against my will into their café. But not a bit of it. As soon as they saw me they looked away or looked at their phones. Some of the less observant girls started to approach me then jumped back in horror like I wasJohn Merrick. Now, I’ve never been one to turn a girl’s head when walking down the street, but what a sorry state of affairs that I am now so old that even a woman whose job it is is to attract men into a bar, completely ignores me.
No - don’t know what to say to this one!!
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