The White Butlers Cafe – for Japanese Women

We got this story sent to us by a reader on this CNN news story (aired on June 30th), “Cafe provides royal treatment.” (2:25 minutes). In My Humble Opinion, I find the story on The Butlers Cafe disturbing in so many ways.

This Shibuya, Tokyo cafe offers a variety of homemade food, sweets and drinks, as well as photo shoots and English lessons with white foreign men. And all the women are addressed as princess. Yes, you read that right…

According to CNN, the founder interview 200 Japanese women and they supposedly all wanted the same thing, “a cafe where the waiters were male, good looking, would treat them nice and most importantly, were Western.”

One of the white waiters compares the place to a Hooters, a themed-restaurant. Please! Can you imagine a restaurant, cafe, coffee shop, or bar in the United States catering to all white men and women, and being served by black men and women? And CNN doing a piece on this place as a puff humor piece? I guess since this is in Japan, it’s okay to show how racist certain Japanese women are against Japanese men? (Then again, I would say that Japanese society is still fairly sexist against Japanese women and one reason why Japan is experiencing negative population growth…)

Stories like these only perpetuate the stereotype that Asian men, and thus most likely, Asian American men, are indifferent, sexless, and worthless, even to women of their own race and only desire the superior white man. Give me a break!

However, in doing some more research (i.e. Google), I did come across an AFP story, “Tokyo cafe taps into women’s Prince Charming fantasies” where the articles goes on to explain a lot more in detail about the cafe that makes it seem a little less disturbing than the CNN piece, like [the owner] interviewed other women and found their wish list — “romantic settings and a chance to learn English. While many were curious about foreign men, they wanted a safe setting — not host clubs or drunken nights out in bars catering to Westerners.”

“In some ways, the Butlers Cafe is a mirror image of the growing number of “maid cafes” where men are served by young women in frilly maid uniforms.” I guess both in Japan and in the United States, having sexist themed restaurants like maid cafes and Hooters are okay (I swear I have never been in a Hooters).