Female Supremacy Articles - Page 23

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A little explanation: the Swallowtail is a "butler café," a Tokyo restaurant staffed entirely by Japanese facsimiles of English manservants, down to the formal tails, white gloves and gracious manners. That's the first cultural oddity. Here's the second: Swallowtail is for women--specifically the burgeoning numbers drawn to manga and anime (Japanese comics and animation), a world that usually caters to slightly antisocial male obsessives. These women are known as otome (their male counterparts are called otaku), which roughly means "maidens," and their tastes run to the medieval fantasies found in their favorite manga, which explains why some of them dress as if they shop at Grimm's of Hollywood, in flowing gothic dresses of whitest white or blackest black. It's all part of the costume play--"cosplay"--that figures heavily in otaku-otome culture.

For men, the desire to live like a manga character gave rise to "maid女仆 — a woman servant cafés," staffed by waitresses dressed in extreme French-maid女仆 — a woman servant outfits. The possibility that women might want a tearoom of their own prompted a group led by Yoko Otsuka, 29, a pleasantly bookish young woman, to create