Bars where one buys a good conversation along with the meal, cafés where the waiters roleplay as one's doting sibling, renting a parent, used underwear from vending machines, maid cafés, maid cafés where the maids are all cross-dressing males, cafés where the attractive male waiters make out with each other for the viewing pleasure of the customer base, cafés where the attractive female waiters wear no underwear, short skirts, and the floors are mirrored — well, that's the joie de vivre that has a big “only in Japan” sticker on it.
The second place with distance is the U.S.A. that at least has cafés where the attractive female waiters wear skimpy outfits, cheerleaders, and bikini car wash — but the rest of the world that has nothing that comes close to this well-inspired madness.
I raise you the slightly hidden world of "tits on toast" from Australia. In regional cities/towns, you can go to certain local pubs early in the day (10AM - 12PM) and get a cheap breakfast served by topless waitresses.
If the waitresses get enough tips, they allegedly remove everything.
The breakfast is usually terrible (cold canned beans on toast with an egg).
In certain areas yeah, but painting all the regions with that brush is strange. Most of the country couldn't handle anything of the sort and the place would be raided by the police in a day. Despite how many pretend play it up to be, Australia is an incredibly conservative country.
The stuff you'll find in mining towns is far worse and basically the wild west. Barstaff will pour you out a beer using their bare asscheeks for a tip. Always wondered what the health authorities think of that.
[1] https://www.upi.com/Archives/1985/11/27/Topless-doughnut-sho...
Spends considerable time in a topless pancake restaurant if I remember correctly.
I have knowledge of the existence of multiple in almost all of what I listed.
https://livejapan.com/en/in-tokyo/in-pref-tokyo/in-ikebukuro...
This article reviews three different boy's love cafés, in close proximity to one another.
I'm not sure how derive the conclusion that there is only one used underwear vending machine; a simple image search reveals many different models:
https://www.techinasia.com/japan-used-panty-vending-machines...
This article concludes that the most extreme stories about one at every corner are an exaggeration, but one can definitely find them.
As for the cafés without underwear: there is definitely more than one, though they've been on a decline.
Of the 3, only the first one is overtly Yaoi. I don't know the second one, but it doesn't seem like one, and the Butler cafe is definitely not Yaoi.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-pan_kissa
After the boom in the 80s (30+ years ago), are there really any left, with the glass floor and everything?
And akiba is short for akihabara.
The underwear vending machine are out, and hidden now, mostly Akiba from what I hear on whispers, not in public. Maybe even one in Nakano broaddway...
And Kissa's in general are in decline, not just no pantsu kissas.
Just one example: All the different "café con piernas" cafes in Chile, which are very similar to Japanese maid cafes.
You seem to have reduced my rather wild and spectacular examples to something so mundane as: “Cafes that cater to lonely straight men or misogynistic businessmen exist”, especially when most of my examples have nothing to do with “straight men” or “misogynistic businessmen”.
It was said that their mothers do everything for them and for a much longer time than other countries. Is this true?
Some of my female coworkers have confirmed this to be true. They say younger guys have problems finding a girlfriend, because they expect her to take care of him the same way his mother did, and younger Japanese women don't want to put up with that kind of attitude anymore.
Regarding social development, my feeling is that Japan is one or two generations behind Western countries.
This is rampantly common in (esp. Southern) Europe as well. The stereotype of the Italian or Greek "mama's boy" who can't do anything around the house and expects their SO to be their surrogate mother is very real.
I really don't think you should be using this as evidence to paint Japan as developmentally retarded as compared to "Western" countries. Respectfully, it comes off as parochial if I'm being charitable, or as working backwards from a desired conclusion if I'm not.
Moreover, this is a trend that crops up all around the world, not just in Japan or Europe. There are plenty of people like this in the US as well. I've met several grown men with well paying jobs who eat out for every meal and have their mothers do their laundry every weekend.
When I say Japan looks to me to be one or two generations behind, is because some of the things I see or hear here are the kind of situations my parents or grandparents got to experience when they were young. Not only what we already discussed, look also at the situation of women in the workplace, or LGBT rights.
There are a great many “western” countries where this is even worse than Japan including the one so often named the primordial “western” country.
I have no idea idea why so often when Japanese culture specifically is discussed the idea is sooner or later proffered that there is some homogeneous “western” culture with common elements that supposedly exists. It certainly doesn't seem to rise when, say, Russian, or Indian culture is discussed.
The classic book on the subject is "The Anatomy of Dependence" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anatomy_of_Dependence
The gist of this is that the parent-child relationship is the ideal one and that extends into the relationships in a collectivist society including that of a manager to an employee.
And so the doting mother to her child... extends a bit longer. The doting mother part isn't new - but rather that that relationship is seen as the ideal one... gets into cultural comparisons.
... but that's the word that can set you on the search for understanding of that phenomena.
That's really not what that article is claiming. It's claiming that a particular individual has lied about the industry and made it seem stranger than it actually is and the western media has sensationalized that even further.
There absolutely are rental services for boyfriends, girlfriends, mothers, fathers, etc. in Japan, they're just not as bizarre as some of these articles would lead you to believe.