Day 90: Den Den Town, Maid Cafes, And The Great Otamatone Search

I walked with some other hostel guests to nearby Den Den Town, a shopping district known for its toys and anime. 

Other than seeing all the weird Japanese toys, I was hoping to find a shop that sells Otamatone, a toy musical instrument that can be played like the slide mechanism on a trombone, usually for humorous effect.

Not Den Den Town, but a nearby shopping area called Ebisuhigashi

We first stopped at a peculiarity that has become increasingly popular in Japan and culturally related areas. A maid café is a type of cosplay restaurant that was originally meant to appeal to the otaku culture in Japan. Waitresses dress up in maid costumes and treat customers more akin to masters and mistresses in a private home rather than run of the mill patrons. I'd never heard of maid cafes before today, and after researching them on the internet I see now what fascinating, strange places they can be. Some offer spoon-feeding services, or allow you to pay for a massage (as long as you keep all your clothes on). One lets you pay ¥2500 to play a game where you must drink a vile concoction one of the maids cooks up, or else be slapped on the face in front of the whole room. Other maid cafes play a tsundere theme, where the maid who serves you will act cold and hostile while serving you but might begin to cry when you get up to leave.

The maid café we visited was nothing too extreme. The interior was decorated in a Victorian style, anime played on a TV on the wall, and to summon your maid you're supposed to ring a small bell. The toilets have a "flushing sound" button (which I've since learned is common to most Japanese toilets, not just maid cafes) that is meant to obscure any bodily sounds you don't want others to hear. Photography was strictly prohibited.

After the maid cafe we explored the huge number of toy, video game, and sex shops that littered Den Den Town. The toy stores stocked toys more in the "Hobby Lobby" sense than the "Toys R Us" sense, and models of trains, planes, cars, boats, anime characters, and guns abounded.

YES, GUNS. Notice the "Kids Land" signs indicating the name of the store next to each gun.

Guns are effectively illegal to own in Japan, but that doesn't stop air gun models from being popular enough to sell. The sex shops were bizarrely frequent, and some were more than three stories tall. In addition to regular pornographic videos, they sold sex toys, hentai, or pornography based computer games. Sections of stores containing pornographic material were restricted from those below 18 years of age, but ground floor displays were often populated with large collections of soft-core pornographic videos containing footage of a bodacious Japanese woman giving platonic massages. And that's not all they sell. I even bought some relatively cheap (non-pornographic) socks that I'd found while perusing the ground floor of one such store.

I was more interested in searching for Otamatone in the toy stores than exploring the Japanese sex industry, of course, but I was governed in part by the whims of the guests I had come with. Unfortunately, the toy stores were more interested in selling models than actual toys (in the American sense of the word "toy") and I wasn't able to find what I was looking for before we walked back to the hostel for the night.