What It’s Like Inside Tokyo’s Wildly Popular Bizarre-Themed Cafes
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ABC News(TOKYO) — For those seeking a truly bizarre dining experience, Tokyo is calling.
Several hundred wildly popular themed cafes have cropped up around Japan, catering to just about any fantasy. There are the now-famous cat cafés, which were copied in Los Angeles, Portland and New York City, but also vampire cafés, Disco Jesus cafés, even bondage cafés and a sexy cabaret robot dance party café — just to name a few.
“There are bunny cafés, dog cafés,” said fashion and travel blogger La Carmina. “I went to the owl café pretty recently where you can pet owls and have them sit on your head.”
“Do you want to be a princess? Then go to the princess café,” she continued. “Do you want to pretend you’re in jail being attacked by monsters? Well, there’s a café for you.”
La Carmina literally wrote the book on Japan’s weird-theme cafés, titled Crazy, Wacky Theme Restaurants: Tokyo.
“To me it’s where you get immersed in the fantasy experience,” she said. “You get to escape your humdrum life.”
There’s nothing humdrum about a Tokyo neighborhood locals call “Electric Town,” where the theme café first started.
In one maid-themed café called Dreamland, the waitress, or “maid,” takes food orders. This was no children’s restaurant. There were grown men in suits who seemed to be enjoying themselves, but La Carmina said “nothing seedy” happens at maid cafés.
“A lot of the people who go to maid cafés, they grew up in the anime and manga-culture, where you have characters wearing French maid outfits,” she said. “You see these cute girls wearing these outfits and the maid café is sort of the setting come to life.”
One of the male patrons said he wasn’t “into this stuff,” that it was “cuteness overload.” La Carmina said there’s a word to describe those overwhelming feelings.
“Moay,” she said. “That’s a term that you’ll often see in Japanese anime where when a guy has a crush on this girl, you can see the hearts coming out of his eyes. It’s, you know, from anime, and that’s moay.”
It can be a bizarre experience, and the cafés only get weirder. A another café called Robot Restaurant featured a strange show that was a sort of psychedelic cabaret of scantily-clad female dancers mixed with a sci-fi robot war. Patrons were given glow sticks to play with as they watched.
The woman behind the Robot Restaurant creation said she was a former dancer and that the show was for middle-aged businessmen to relive a greatest hits of all their boyhood fantasies: Robots, war and sex.
But now, the Robot Restaurant creator said plenty of women and tourists from around the world have come to see its bizarre show, and her dream is to take it to Vegas.
Watch the full story on ABC News’ Nightline Friday night at 12:35 a.m. ET
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