In Defense of Kawaii

Maid cafes, frilly dresses, and high heels are degrading to women. But are they?

My first time going to Maid Cafe in Japan was with my Mom and Aunt. They came alongside me from Michigan and knew of the concept since I worked at a similar establishment in the US. The business model is complicated. Young women(17+) wear anime-inspired maid costumes and greet patrons with “Welcome Home, Master!”. They play games like Hungry Hungry Hippo. Some cafes offer services where maids will blow on your food with a spoon and most famously, they charge you to take an Instax photo with them.

In January 2015, we sat in a busy maid cafe in Tokyo’s Akihabara district. I knew a Korean Maid from Facebook who invited me to see her at MaiDreamin. Not shocking, we were the only women there. As we poked around our $20 Katsu curry, my mother made a note to point to a Japanese man in his late thirties also in the cafe. He was alone. “That guy seems like he comes here every day.” The man was sitting by himself, drinking a milkshake, enjoying a song one of the girls was singing. A small group of European men shuffled outside of the venue. “They probably expected tits or something. That’s what anyone would think.”

When we left, my aunt noted how gross she felt by the atmosphere. “I felt so bad for those girls in there.” When I asserted that they were all well into their twenties and that there were no sexual services sold, they heard none of it. I couldn’t help but think if these young women were not Asian, they wouldn’t patronize them so much. 

Maid Cafes began in 1999 as a pop-up event for the PC Game Pia Carrott. The event was so successful that within a decade, hundreds of maid cafes had sprung up in Tokyo’s gamer district, Akihabara. These cafes have become synonymous with Japan’s “weird sex culture.” Yet they have nothing to do with sex. At all.

As you can read in my previous article, Crazy Sexy Tokyo, sexual services are reasonably accessible all over Tokyo.

In fact, plenty of services are provided where sex workers play as maid cafe maids. In spite of this, Hostess Cafes, Girls' Bars, and Maid Cafes all thrive. It may be unimaginable for the average Westerner, but women are incredibly appealing outside of the physical act of sex. Shocking. This appeal is so alluring that some men can’t help but pay for women to pretend to be into them. And it has nothing to do with sex at all.

In 2017 I wrote a tweet that went viral. It’s kind of hard to understand without the context, however, the original tweet mentioned an article that stated that Japan’s Kawaii Culture was holding women back. I rejected this by asserting a long repeated trope that Kawaii culture had been created in rebellion by Japanese women. I created this response when I still lived in Japan and the original article was written by a non-Japanese Asian woman who also lived in Japan. I have problems with my original tweet.

For one, the infantilization of Asian women is quite insidious. This is in and outside of Asia. I myself am not an Asian woman and should have been cognizant of this fact when I made this response. In addition, Japan repeatedly ranks low when it comes to the Gender Equality Index in G-7 nations. Yikes. 

Since my tweet has been paraphrased by Twitter thieves and Reddit posters alike I’d like to reiterate this point, I am totally in favor of Kawaii culture. Let me be clear in stating that I am in favor of allowing adult women to portray themselves as cutesy or girlish if they want to.

I’m not sure if this is a Western thing or a foolish thing but we often talk about how the world ought to be rather than how it is. We expect women to play by rules of idealism rather than by reality. It’s a man’s world, baby. Yes that sucks.

There are women, in Japan and America who adopt baby voices to infantilize themselves. I’ve been one of them. Some women appeal to men aesthetically by donning traditionally feminine attire. Any reasonable person would agree that women should not have to adopt these traits for social mobility. Women should be able to adopt femininity as little or as much as they’d like and still be treated with the utmost respect. That’s how society ought to be.

In reality, most women don’t have so many choices. Infantilizing oneself often does, work. Yes, this is manipulative.  White women seem to do this all the time with little to no recourse. But while society sucks, why are women so demonized for working within the limitations we were given? I’m all for dismantling the system! But I and many women around me have material needs…now. Plus, who hasn’t cried a little bit to get out of a traffic ticket?

I dream of a world where women can be masculine and still be treated as we should be treated…amazingly. It sucks that women have to teeter between respectability and traditionalism. Real progression is realizing these constraints and not blaming women who survive within them. Being a progressive is being support of women making choices for ourselves. Not the State, other women, elders, men or church. Ourselves.

Plus–-what’s so bad about hyper-femininity? Wearing frills, pink, liking stuffed animals, and talking in a high-pitched voice is all fine by me. No matter your gender. I can’t be the only one who sees the misogyny in shaming people who are hyper-feminine.

Men have a large majority of wealth and resources throughout the world. It’s natural to adopt “appealing” traits to become closer to those resources. Perhaps you consider maid cafes degrading because their entire concept is young women acting stereotypically hyper-femme to sell omurice to otaku man-children. In this arrangement, the employment is not due to financial constraints but rather personal interests. Most importantly, they are the ones benefiting financially. Plus – have you considered why you consider femininity or “kawaii” degrading?