Granny Maid Café | A Twist On The Popular "Maid" Cafés in Japan at Schema : more than ethnic

Granny Maid Café | A Twist On The Popular "Maid" Cafés in Japan

Emerging from the anime and otaku subculture, maid cafés are a unique Japanese phenomenon that tries to recreate the cute and innocent female characters in anime as café servers. Dressed up in French maid costumes, the maids' main goal is to appear as fantasy-like as possible to pamper the patrons. (Needless to say, the maids are pretty much exclusively female.)

The types of pampering varies by café, but they include everything from stirring the cream into the patron's coffee, spoon-feeding the patron, or even writing on the patron's omelette rice plate with ketchup to make the food taste better.

Now, a performance artist is taking the maid café to a new level: Miwa Yanagi, a Kyoto City University of Arts graduate, is opening a "granny maid" café as part of Festival/Tokyo. Unlike the perpetually youthful and innocent-looking maids of maid cafés, the maids at Café Rottenmeier are diverse in age (from 24 to 77), and are modeled after Mrs. Rottenmeier, the stern older housekeeper figure from the popular Heidi, Girl of the Alps manga (adapted from Johanna Spyri's original novel Heidi).

The maids have been selected by the artist through an open call that asked the women to "see themselves as grannies." The maids wear custom-made 19th-century European-inspired costumes and wigs, and serve European-style food on period tablecloths and plates.

Granny maid.jpg

As a feminist, the idea of a "maid café" where the server's sole purpose is to be consumed and objectified by the public makes me feel nervous; however, a granny maid café that comments on the youth-obsessed, commodified nature of sexuality sounds intriguing.

Yanagi has been exploring women's relationship with age through her video series My Grandmothers (where young women imagine their lives 50 years from now) and Granddaughters (senior women remembering their own grandmothers). Now with Café Rottenmeier, Yanagi's exploration of women's aging process intersects with the fictional realm of anime.

Café Rottenmeier will be open to the public until the end of November, from noon to 10:00 pm every weekend and on public holidays. During the last week, the maids will perform a theatre piece written and directed by the artist herself.

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Comments

That's so fascinating! I wish I could actually be there to experience it!

Interesting article! Thought I feel a 'granny based' cafe still has problematic written allover it. While it may not be as arguably fetishizing (GILFs anyone?) as its younger counterparts, it still capitalizes on prevalent social stereotypes of servient female figures. I'd guess the demography of the clients would still be highly gender disproportionate...?

The film series you mention sounds interesting! Maybe you should write about that too, Rosel ;)

Thanks for all the feedback, everyone!

Devon: I see where you're coming from. However, I think the fact that this is done by a performance artist (rather than a money-making franchise looking to cash in on the problematic phenomenon) will at least be self-reflexive enough to avoid any GILF-ism. Maybe that's just my wishful thinking? I suppose I'll have to be there to determine that.

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