Comments on: Akihabara: Lost in Trancelation

By: MB

MB — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 14:01:10 +0000

Scott: still tan/yellow v. green, yes?

Silence - I think being there might leave you with the feeling of “huh?” I didn’t go to any of the cafes like the one described, but I spent the better part of a day poking around (remember, this is otaku-central). Aside from the general wonderment at the objects for sale, the other feeling I came away with was “Really? That is what works for someone?” Not judgment or being creeped out, just . . . completely missing the appeal of many of the things I’d seen.

Ah well. Great that a place like this exists, though.

By: Scott Nolan

Scott Nolan — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 17:38:34 +0000

When I was in the military we had a problem with dependent daughters showing up in the NCO clubs; so the trick we used was to make sure we arranged to see their military ID card… you did not have to look close as the active-duty ID was vastly and clearly different than the dependent ID cards.

By: silence dogood

silence dogood — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 15:34:44 +0000

Wow. I thought I was a fairly open-minded person until about six minutes ago, when I got to the picture of the chick dressed like Julie Andrews. Although strangely, by the time I got to the transvestite dressed half of a nun, I wasn’t shocked anymore–I guess it’s just that there’s implicit irony in a man dressing up like ANY woman, whereas a substantial part of me wonders if Julie Andrews is wearing that outfit in earnest.

The maid cafe thing was also kind of crazy. It’s like an emotional sort of bondage, from the description, and I wonder if in spite of the costuming, the men in the cafe aren’t actually the subs. From the description, it sounds like they’re the ones being restrained by chains of polite sexual tension.

Crazy. I’d love to go and find out more, but it’s frankly creeping me out how much an attractive Japanese woman in her late 20s looks exactly like the Japanese girls in their early teens that I grew up with.

(I hate that 14 year old girls dress like women in their mid-20s in this country, too, incidentally. I can’t tell how old a woman is by looking at her anymore, which has made me swear off of anyone under the age of 30 because it feels too much like dating a high school ssophomore otherwise).