Tokyo August pt 7 - Next Stop - Akiba!

Pat, Swang and I took the train down to Akihabara, the electronics district of Tokyo which has also transformed into the video game, anime and manga (and related porn) district..

土曜日晩パット君、ステイベン君と私は一緒秋葉原へ行った！もちろんメード喫茶店へ行った！(僕は毎回東京に居る、 メイドカフェへ居く！）

purely coincidentally (or not) Akihabara has also become ground zero to the phenomenon of Maid Cafes (which you may remember i blogged about here and here in the past).

First we stopped by a cool store devoted to 'retro games' called ' Retro Game Super Potato'. 

It was 3 floors of a small building - one floor devoted to old school stuff like Fami-con and super-famicon (aka NES and Super NES) games, a second floor with game soundtracks, portable games (old school gameboys,  etc) and a third floor with a small arcade w/ many old 90's games. 

They had this Otaku throne made out of Super Famicon cartridges...   its good to see people recycling. ;-)

OK, next stop - Maid Cafe!

We had an hour to kill before our next appointment so we tried to go to the At Home maid cafe that you may remember from this blog... but unfortunately it was super full (it was 6pm on a Saturday).  This place now has 4 floors with four separate cafes (i think last time it was only 3). all had lines extending into the stairway waiting for a table.    We decided to try a different place - we almost went to ' Maid Reflexology' (foot massage), but instead ended up going to a cool Maid Cafe called 'Pinafore'.

As you can probably know, usually maid cafes feature girls wearing European maid outfits,  but in this case they had a special promotion going with EA games for a new military video game called 'Bad Company'... so for this month only some of the staff were wearing army cadet type outfits (but obviously a bit more flattering than a real one). 

I found these pics on the maid cafe's website:

yes, there were (fake) grenades on each table...

a great marketing idea for sure! direct marketing to EA's key customer demographics... :-P

I actually put my 'I am Goshujin-sama'  t-shirt on while at the maid cafe... the maid girls thought it was quite funny that this weird white otaku guy was in their midst and unashamedly proclaiming himself a maid cafe regular. :-P

but we didn't get to enjoy it too long, we had to run to the subway station and go to Ginza for dinner..... (in the next blog!)