Customer Service

There’s a café in Akihabara where the staff beats you. Actually beats you—throws you against walls, hits you while you’re trying to drink your coffee. They’re harder on the men. The women seem to enjoy it, which has its own appeal.

The concept is that it’s celebrating a video game, but nobody cares about the game. What they’re actually selling is a specific fantasy: women smiling while they overpower you, wanting you badly enough to beat you. There’s a crude honesty in that transaction. Someone’s paying for exactly what they want, someone’s getting paid to provide it, and both parties seem pretty happy about the arrangement.

Akihabara has been building toward this for a while. The whole district is fantasy made available—maid cafés, game shops, everything optimized for a very specific kind of loneliness. This café is just the logical endpoint. Why roleplay service when you can have the real thing? Why keep the fantasy at a distance when you could let it physically overpower you?

I’ve walked through that district enough times to understand the appeal and still find it claustrophobic. Everything is right there, everything is available, and that’s somehow more depressing than the mystery was. You’re not longing for anything anymore, you’re just consuming whatever’s in front of you.

If this is what you want, Akihabara will give it to you. The whole neighborhood exists for people exactly like this.