Japanese oddity, cont.

Japan's girl geek boom - World - theage.com.au

Japanese character themed cafes have normally catered for sex starved single men whose geekiness repels all normal Japanese women. Get out of the train station at Akihabara (geek central in Tokyo) on a weekend, and there will probably be a dozen girls in french maid or some other character outfit handing out directions to their cafes down the street. The male photographers make for quite a throng.

This new version of such a cafe, however, is even odder:

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.

So far so weird. But it is not like the student characters are even meant to be really interested in the women customers:

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.

This next line really made me laugh:

"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.

The Japanese really need something better to occupy their minds.