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Beijing. “Welcome home, master!” a bunch of young waitresses dressed in French maid costumes and black fishnet stockings chime in unison in Japanese as a customer enters the cafe.

Posters and memorabilia of Japanese anime cover the cafe’s walls. Smoke rises from an iron griddle cooking okonomiyaki, a savory pancake.

It could have been a scene from the many maid cafes dotting Tokyo’s Akihabara district, where the first such theme cafe sprang up more than a decade ago. But it is, in fact, in Beijing.

Maid cafes are taking off in China, with at least eight major cities hosting these cosplay restaurants, where waitresses dressed in maid costumes pamper customers.

Besides mushrooming in the major metropolises of Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, such cafes have popped up in second and third-tier cities such as north-western Xi’an and central Changsha in the past year.

A key reason is the coming of age of China’s lovers of Japanese anime and their growing economic prowess.

“The kids who love anime have grown up, are earning money and can afford to spend,” said Hiroyuki Minegisi, adviser to the Yaneura Maid Cafe Kitchen in eastern Beijing.

“The consumer strength of the Chinese has grown tremendously in recent years. We are even seeing high-school students dining in our restaurant.”

Chinese maid cafes are largely similar to their Japanese cousins. They target male geeks who love Japanese cartoons and comics.

The cafes cater to the fantasies and fetishes of these comic lovers by recreating anime settings where young and innocent-looking women treat the men like masters.

In the cafes, the waitresses are usually dressed as French maids, although some put on Japanese schoolgirl uniforms. Yaneura in Beijing, for instance, has a “private school” theme every few months.

Most of the waitresses are in their late teens or early 20s and usually chosen because of their good looks.

“I select my waitresses from the universities and they must be pretty, refined, hardworking and love anime,” said Lang Renbin, owner of Hangzhou’s Little Red Hat Maid Cafe.

They greet every customer as “master” and welcome them ‘“home” when they enter the cafes. Most perform their duties in a coquettish manner, often in a high-pitched voice.

And in their interaction with customers, which is the crux of maid cafes, they take instant photos with the patrons, doodle on their food with tomato ketchup and play table and computer games.

But that is about it. Customers are not allowed to touch the waitresses. “Some customers come in thinking we are a nightclub,” Lang said.

Added Minegisi: “Obviously we have had some clients who still do not understand the maid cafe concept and got frisky. But they usually behave themselves after we explain it to them.”

The Chinese incarnations have tended to be more conservative than the Japanese cafes.

Some maid cafes in Japan have diversified into bizarre and niche characters, costumes and services, feeding an extreme fetish crowd in the face of intense competition. Some offer slapping and feeding services, while others have maids who get down on their knees to make coffee and tea.

Customers can even ask a waitress to pretend to be his disgruntled girlfriend and scold him and splash him with water as he goes on all fours. Some Japanese cafes are believed to offer sexual services.

No such hanky-panky in the ones in China. All four maid cafes that The Straits Times spoke to said they have never had any problems with the police.

“We don’t offer anything too quirky or risque. The people here are rather conservative and wouldn’t approve of that,” said the owner of a maid cafe in Jinan, the provincial capital of coastal Shandong. She asked to be identified only as Kong.

Minegisi said the waitresses in his cafe were initially apprehensive about calling customers “masters” in Mandarin.

“The Chinese people are still afraid of such overt status and class differences. It was only when we asked them to say it in Japanese that they agreed,” he shared.

“In fact, a lot of girls who came here looking for a job took one look at the uniform and walked away. They didn’t think it was a proper job.”

Reprinted courtesy of Straits Times Indonesia. To subscribe to Straits Times Indonesia and/or the Jakarta Globe call 021 2553 5055.