Young female journalist "embeds" as cosplay maid to cover anime convention

"I was at Katsucon, a Washington, D.C. convention that caters to fans of Japanese animation. The restaurant I was working at was inspired by the “maid cafes” of Tokyo, where people can have a meal served to them by a cute young girl in a costume. The cafe organizers were worried that having a student journalist trailing the maids would be distracting. But if that journalist was also a maid, they had no problem."

—24-year-old Lauren Rae Orsini, guestblogging at Susannah Breslin's Forbes column.

• [MacBookHeir]

  This is a cute story I guess, but at age 24 I can’t tell whether this young female “journalist” enjoyed here cosplay stint or found it mildly disgusting. From the smile in her photo I would guess she found her important journalistic assignment to be simply swell

  • [Anonymous]

    @MacBookHeir
    Why the scare quotes? She’s a journalist, and her topic is geek culture. That’s perfectly legit.

    • [Anonymous]

      You missed the funny. He said “swell”.

  • [Antinous / Moderator]

    From the smile in her photo I would guess she found her important journalistic assignment to be simply swell.

    I’m guessing that you don’t do well on those ‘tell the real smile from the fake smile’ tests.

    • [Anonymous]

      http://otakujournalist.com/2011/03/march-cosplay-meetup/

      “Little Wolf, if you are reading this, you need to give me your real name sometime!”

      That doesn’t sound like something a person who had to fake a smile would say…

• [Anonymous]

  For some reason, I’m reminded of the time that Sarah Vowell “imbeded” with goths. http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/118/what-you-lookin-at

• [swestcott]

  this looked like something I had read before
  http://jezebel.com/5472057/tales-from-the-maid-cafe

• [Zadaz]

  See also: Klan Rally 70% Undercover Reporters.

• [blueworld]

  From the story, I got the impression that she found working as a waitress in a French maid outfit distasteful for the same reasons as any service worker has: tired feet, annoying customers. She identifies as a geek herself and it sounds like she enjoyed her conversations with other con-goers, even the furries, so often maligned even by other fans. “Women like Hana, Lily, Yomiko, Little Wolf, and the Lolitas inspire me as a journalist. They’re doing their own thing, and they don’t care what others think.” Doesn’t sound disgusted to me.

• [rwmj]

  $100 for many hours of work. Welcome to the internet economy!

• [Anonymous]

  Aaaaaah what the fuck. She went to my college, we had a class together. That was genuinely startling.

• [jaytkay]

  WTFJapan.jpg

• [blueelm]

  So, where is the article she produced from this? The link seems to go to some sort of autobiography and guide to being a journalist written by a 20 year old who spent a day learning that people doing work you wouldn’t like are probably not as crazy as they seem.

  • [Stefan Jones]

    “So, where is the article she produced from this?”

    It’s cleverly hidden in the linked-to making-of article:

    http://inews6.americanobserver.net/articles/katsucon-maid-cafe-forum-self-expression

    • [blueelm]

      Thanks. I’m actually relieved to have missed it.

• [benher]

  I am reading this from a maid cafe in Osaka… does BoingBoing have some sort of stamp-card point system I can cash in on?

• [tw15]

  You working as a waitress in a cosplay bar
  When I met you. I doll-ed you up
  I masked you up
  and turned you around
  Turned you into someone new

  etc

• [Anonymous]

  Better to be furries than furbies, I guess. Just imagine.

  …

  See how the sex got creepier?