Sumimasen Gyaru-son!

Tokyo has a lot of “Maid Cafes”, especially around the Otaku district of Akihabara in the Akihabara Electric Town (Akihabara Denki Ga). These Maid Cafes usually have cute girls dressed in lolita-style maid outfits, and serve the customers with drinks and food. If you pay a little extra, they will even play games with you, such as Connect 4 or draughts etc. These cafes have been the province of young male otaku until now…

The Otome Road (Maiden Road) in Ikebukuro district is becoming the yaoi answer to Akihabara’s otaku centre. Yaoi is a genre of manga popular with girls that focuses on homosexual love between men and is often sexually explicit. Yaoi as a term more used in English speaking countries, as the term “BL” (or Boys Love) is used more in Japan. A restraurant has opened on Otome Road called Lily Rose, which is a BL restaurant. The restaurant’s waiters are all really attractive young men in the BL style. Well, they’re really young women, dressed as young BL guys, with male names like Kaisuke-kun (kun being a honorific like san, but reserved for younger males you’re very familiar with). Generally in BL stories, you have “seme” and “uke”. Just like in martial arts where seme “attacks” and uke “receives”. This term has been used in terms of sexual relationships for a long time, and is in no way pejorative. Seme is generally more a traditional “masculine” role, being restrained, strong and protective – whereas uke would be more andryogenous or girlish in looks and behaviour. The waiters are called “gyaru-son”, which is another great portmanteau-type Japanese joke. Gyaru means “gal” as in a trendy young Japanese girl, with the word “son”, making a play on “garcon” – French for boy.

You might think it’s a little strange for girls to come to a restaurant staffed by girls to see guys – but one patron likes it: “Because the staff are really women, I can eat without fear of a man trying to pick me up, allowing me to take in the beauty of the ‘men’ around me as I enjoy my food.”

It’s just another reason why Japan is the most fantastic country on earth (^ ^)

Bento Lunches

Bento (in Japanese; 弁当 or べんとう) are small boxed lunches that are very popular in Japan. Traditionally they were rice, fish or meat and carried in a laquered wooden box. In the past, they were very popular with school children, but as the children from poorer families were given lower-quality food, and the children from richer familes were given much better food, it obviously displayed your family’s status, so they were phased out in schools. Recently, they’ve become much more popular, but the same situation applies really. It’s considered a very important skill for a housewife to be able to prepare a nutritious and visually appealing boxed lunch – although now they’re packaged in plastic bento boxes, often decorated with idols, manga characters or nice designs.

Photo from Janine’s Flickr Stream

Typically with Japanese cuisine, they are presented beautifully and often the food is prepared to look like other things, such as rice balls in the shape of a face, penguin-shaped cookies etc. There are a multitude of tools available to the bento maker to prepare these, including cutters, food seperators that look like grass and little bottles for soy sauce in the shape of fish etc.

Historically they originated in the 1200’s and were a “dried meal” called hoshi-ii (糒 or 干し飯 in Japanese), although later on they were presented in the wooden boxes you sometimes see at nice restaurants in Japan. Travellers would often carry a “waist bento” called a koshibentō (腰弁当) which consisted of onigiri (御握り or おにぎり) which are small rice balls shaped into a triangle. Modern bentos often have these too, with a face made of other ingredients to make it more pleasing. Apparently onigiri were used by samurai who stored rice balls in leaves when they were out doing their samurai thing.

There are many types of bento too; choka bento (中華弁当) which is Chinese food, Kamameshi bentō (釜飯弁当) sold at train stations, Sushizume (鮨詰め) “packed sushi”, Shidashi bentō (仕出し弁当) normally prepared by a restaurant and often eaten at parties (containing things like pickles with tempura or katsu curry or sometimes western food) – and also Hinomaru bento (日の丸弁当) – one of my favorites, containing plain rice with an umeboshi (梅干) in the center to look like the Japanese flag (Hinomaru). Umeboshi is a distinctly Japanese food – a kind of plum picked in vinegar. Vinegar in Japan is often different to what the westerner would expect as umeboshi is picked in a barrel with lots of salt – the resulting juice and salt is the vinegar. It can be a shock to those trying it for the first time. It has an extremely sour and salty taste, and is said to improve health, despite the high salt content. For example, if you had a cold, you’d have “okayu” or “Japanese congee”, a type of rice porridge. Sometimes it’s put into Japanese drinks such as shochu for decoration and flavour. I’d recommend adventurous types to look some out at your local asian food store and try them. It’s a real Japanese experience!