More fetishes from the Land of the Rising Sun.
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The success of homoerotic romances and manga comics has fueled the growth of an industry that’s targeting the female otaku — women who are also fans of animation movies, computer games and comics. In short: all things geeky.
Tokyo’s Edelstein Boarding School
At Japan’s first schoolboy café, Edelstein Boarding School, girlish looking waiters dressed as school boys, giggle and flirt with older female patrons, who pretend to be visitors to the school. Waiters at the café are selected for their feminine looks that mirror the appearance of characters in the boy love manga comics have.
Role play certainly isn’t new to Japanese culture, and cafés which cash in on this fetish have always existed, even thrived. Anthropologists have their own take on why the Japanese love to play out other characters – it offers a respite from the rigid social structure and strongly defined gender roles that mark Japanese culture. The only difference has been that such role play cafés have long been patronized predominantly by men. Now, for the first time, women are joining in the fray en masse.
The success of boy-love manga comics — which essentially feature boy-love tales that include bondage and graphic sex — has been unprecedented, and has awakened entrepreneurs to a new free spending Japanese consumer — the young, trendy, well living, female geek. Look for other Japanese-first trends reaching for this new demographic in the days to come.