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Carl Gustav Horn, Dark Horse Manga Editor and one of the world's experts on both manga and rap music, once hummed lyrics from the Beastie Boys' "Girls" while describing the roles of female characters in manga: "Girls-- to do the dishes; Girls-- to clean up my room; Girls-- to do my laundry; Girls-- and in the bathroom…"
Such are the crumbs of genius that fall from Carl's table, where, if this were anime or manga, a frilly-skirted maid would sweep them up. Like any true nerd for their chosen passion, I consider myself an evangelist for manga, but no aspect of manga (or Japanese pop culture in general) confuses me more than the overwhelming fetish for maids. "How to Draw Manga" books are devoted to
the fine art of the maid uniform.
Maid cafés are found throughout Japan's nerd centers, and the first American maid café, Royal/T in Culver City, CA (
http://www.royal-t.org/), opened in 2008 and already has a mind-blowing 250 yelp reviews. (Even
Ken Tanaka visited it.) Girls in maid uniforms are common sights in manga and anime, and even series which have nothing to do with maids, like the crime manga
Black Lagoon and the science fiction manga
Coyote Ragtime Show, can't resist having maids show up. What's the appeal?
Let's be blunt: the obvious answer is sex. Manga like
He is My Master and
Enmusu make this explicit;
isn't every boy's fantasy to have a maid to do their every bidding? Viewed in this light, the maid fixation is just the natural evolution of the subservient, domestic female characters so common in romantic comedy manga: Belldandy from
Oh My Goddess! sweeping the house with her broom (at least the landlady in
Maison Ikkoku gets paid for it), 8-year-old Sasami from
Tenchi Muyo! chopping up vegetables in the kitchen. Once the women are
literally maids, the domestic work makes sense, and breaking the employer-employee relationship taboo is small potatoes compared to the kink in most manga.
The maid uniform indicates absolute submission, but it's also a cover story: maybe they really
are there to clean your room. The cover story may also be there to spare your own fragile psyche. Girls cosplaying as prostitutes, in miniskirts and thigh-high boots, is obviously unacceptable and dirty; girls cosplaying as maids are clean by definition. Maid cafés offer a socially acceptable level of servant-master roleplay without the guilt level of visiting a more blatant men's establishment, such as one of the no-panties cafés which was popular in Japan in the early '80s. I am using the term "roleplay" in a non-
Dungeons & Dragons sense for once, although it's entertaining to note that the only translated Japanese tabletop roleplaying game is
Maid: The Role-Playing Game, in which the players act out the role of maids competing for the Dungeon Master's affections.
That's one thing about maids: they may be servants, but they can still
compete. On the one hand, this competition may be on the level of
Ai Yori Aoshi where the American girl is intimidated by the homemaking skills of her Japanese rival. On the other hand, it may be on the level of machine guns and martial arts. Butt-kicking maids, ready to give their lives for their master, are sort of the female equivalent of ninja, who are traditionally depicted in manga (
Shinobi Life,
Tail of the Moon,
Teru Teru x Shonen) not as infiltrators and spies so much as supracompetent bodyguards always ready to protect their beloved princess. Substitute "master" for "princess," and you have
Hanaukyo Maid Team, in which a hapless nerd ends up in a mansion protected by armies and armies of heavily-armed maids—a mass production of clone-stamped maid uniforms and female flesh which overwhelms more than it impresses.
Maid War Chronicle takes place in a fantasy setting with less skin and more complaining on the maids' part. The fetishism is more focused in
Mahoromatic, about
an emo boy who likes porn and the ex-military maid robot who cleans up his messes (to quote the geneous Wikipedia article: "Mahoromatic is a sci-fi romantic comedy manga and anime series which contains elements of the literary genre of tragic dramas").
The Japanese video game
The Maid Fuku to Kikanjuu ("Maid Uniform and Machine Gun") is named after an old exploitation movie "Sailor Suit and Machine Gun." The maid-robot
Steel Angel Kurumi is cousin to the submissive robot girls in
Chobits, the sexually abused maid-warriors of
Sarai, and any number of other manga about female robots, maids, goddesses, genies, and other not entirely human creatures. The insane main characters of the satirical manga/novel series
Welcome to the NHK at one point dream up the ultimate fetish character:
a blind, senile, wheelchair-bound maid-robot-space-alien.
Surrounded by these sexist images, what's a female manga fan to do? Conveniently, the hierarchical relationships so common in Japanese pop culture (master-servant, aniki-ototo, seme-uke) aren't entirely dependent on gender. Butler cafés, in which handsome men serve women, are also popular in Japan, as are manga like
Black Butler, about a loyal demon in butler's clothing. Manga such as
Inuyasha and
Hellsing, in which monsters are bound to serve the heroines, could also be said to fall into this category.
As for the sexual aspect, clearly the best revenge is depicting men in "sissy maid" uniforms receiving kinky maid humiliation from other men. (To name just a few
yaoi examples:
Kaisuru Maid Shonen ("Loving Maid Boy"),
Oh! My Maid,
Stop! Master,
Maid in Heaven.)
But the maid uniform has been non-ironically embraced by female fans as well. Just ask the volunteers running
maid cafés at anime conventions-- they ain't held at gunpoint-- or the fans of shojo manga like
A Tale of an Unknown Country and
Maid sama!, a popular series about a girl who is a badass at her school but who must work at a maid café for money, switching back and forth between the subservient and (nominally) feminist roles. In
Butterflies, Flowers a former butler rises to the position of a corporate president and bosses it over his onetime mistress, as the two of them trade dom-sub roles like passing the baton at a relay race.
But it's the European maid uniform specifically which is appealing to Japanese readers. Perhaps it's because European maids are foreign and exotic, the same way that geisha (but not
miko, shrine priestesses, whom no Americans are hot for) appeal to Western audiences. These fantasies are not made to be dissected, so there are few "realistic" manga about maids, but Kaoru Mori's Victorian romance
Emma comes close.
Emma, set in 1895 Britain, is the love story of
a young gentleman and a maid, separated by their social class and her sense of duty. Though Mori's England is rose-colored, it shares some similarities with Kazuo Ishiguro's novel
The Remains of the Day, another story about a noble, self-sacrificing servant who cannot admit his emotions. It's a theme as much Japanese as British.
But servant-master relationships don't need to be doom and gloom and unrequited love (or machine guns and martial arts), as demonstrated by the recent
josei (women's) manga adaptations of P.G Wodehouses's Jeeves & Wooster novels, Bun Katsuta's
Please, Jeeves. The wacky adventures of a foppish young blonde and his indulgent, patient dark-haired caretaker—it's a match made in manga heaven!
Emma and
Please, Jeeves are my favorite maid/butler manga, although the J.G. Ballard sexual-fetish-dissecter side in me also respects the sheer atrocity-exhibition fascination of stories like Takahiro Seguchi's S&M-themed
Enmusu (quotes
one reviewer: "tries to justify intolerable cruelty with a coal black view of humanity"). The very worst maid manga in English is probably Atsuhisa Okura's OEL manga
Moe USA, partly for its horrible art and partly for being produced for American all-ages audiences with not a blink of irony about its premise -- American girls go to Japan and are thrilled to end up working at a maid café in maid uniforms. MAGIC maid uniforms.
In Japan, the maid and butler fetish may be fading by the time you read this --
mother cafés, anyone? -- but the images of maids persist everywhere. Older anime and manga fans, in both Japan and America, have complained that the maid boom is the sign of a dissolute younger generation; when
they were fans, people liked
real anime, like…like
Devil Hunter Yohko! But the old folk are perhaps disingenuous in complaining, since the '80s was also an era of anime and manga sleaze—the
lolicon works of Hideo Azuma, the blooming market in direct-to-video anime porn. It's a familiar story; the adult market takes something cute and "innocent," like Hayao Miyazaki's pubescent heroines, and turns it into porn.
The biggest difference in the 2000s maid boom is that the process seems to have operated in reverse; maids crossed over from fetish to mainstream. Though otaku might object and say it's all innocent, frilly French maid uniforms are as impractical in the real world as assless chaps. But, like ex-porn stars getting mainstream roles (or like
yaoi insinuations becoming common in even manga aimed at straight guys), maid uniforms went out of the closet and onto the street. Today, maid uniforms show up even in manga with nothing to do with maids, whether as a throwaway thrill in romantic comedy manga (
Pretty Face,
Gacha Gacha, etc.), or as costumes for female servitors in manga like
Nephylym and
Polyphonica: Cardinal Crimson.
To point out the fetishism of maid uniforms in such a dustpan-suffused environment is as pointless as complaining about tight-spandexed superhero uniforms; mock them all you like, the uniforms are there to stay. Not that Grant Morrison's
Flex Mentallo didn't get good mileage out of it-- and incidentally, if you want to see a manga which makes fun of both superheroes AND maids, check out the splendor of
Kamen no Maid Guy ("Masked Maid Guy"), (
http://ultimatenullifier.blogspot.com/2005_12_01_archive.html), a parody about a super-buff male maid/ninja/superhero/monster/something. The comparison to American superhero comics is also expressed by a quote from
Simon Jones, editor of the adult manga company Icarus Comics, speculating on the decline of manga sales in Japan:
It all comes down to fewer companies being able to produce mainstream products, because a growing segment of mainstream audiences are no longer willing to pay for them…so instead, companies focus on a specific set of consumers who are willing to pay top dollar…i.e. otaku…the less the masses support art directly, the more likely art will revert back to the patron system of old, where a few individuals dictate the direction of art.
Jones' point of reference is Renaissance art, not the superhero comics market in the late 20th century, but the similarity is there. As the market shrinks, what's left is fanboys who demand more of the same, causing a potentially vicious circle as manga becomes nerdier and nerdier and nerdier. Publishers respond by pumping out the maid titles, giving every manga a maid connection (however tenuous), and generally covering their butts with a frilly skirt and apron-strings. In tough economic times for manga, the maid needs to do more than clean and cook; she needs to go out and bring home the bacon.
Jason Thompson is one of the best-known manga critics in the US. He currently writes for Otaku USA and is the author of Manga: The Complete Guide. His website is www.mockman.com.
Manga Salad is © Jason Thompson, 2010
