Boy cafes, sexy comics feed Japan's girl geek boom

By Sophie Hardach

TOKYO (Reuters) - At Edelstein boarding school, the schoolboys wear lip-gloss, the headmistress has a weakness for homoerotic comic books, and there is only one subject: how to serve female visitors.

Welcome to Tokyo's first schoolboy cafe, the latest in a flurry of eateries in Japan where customers and waiters role play themes from manga comics.

In keeping with the schoolboy theme, waiters with manicured hands and soft voices pretend to be teenage students, chatting and flirting with well-dressed Japanese women playing the roles of benefactresses visiting the school.

On a Saturday in January, the cafe, which opened late last year, was packed with giggling customers.

"Most of our customers are office ladies in their twenties and thirties, women who are fashionable but normal," said Emiko Sakamaki, Edelstein's 27-year-old manager, herself dressed in a loose mini-dress over skinny jeans and knee-high boots.

Edelstein is based on one of Sakamaki's favorite comic books, a 1970s cult classic about romance at a German school.

Its visitors are united by a passion for such "boy-love manga", or comics about boy-boy romance for female readers -- a genre that is currently undergoing a huge revival in Japan.

Most boy-love manga feature dreamy, feminine-looking male characters. The same beauty ideal guides Sakamaki when she selects the waiters who talk about their pretend homework and studies at Edelstein.

"I'm in the flower arrangement club," whispers one girlish, long-haired waiter at the cafe, looking up from the book of German poetry he is reading.

RACY BOY-LOVE

Role-play cafes for men have long been popular in Tokyo. Most revolve around waitresses dressed as French maids and target "otaku" -- geeky fans of comics and animation movies.

One of the reasons that role-play and dressing up are so popular in Japan is that they allow people to briefly escape the extreme social control and rigid norms of everyday life, anthropologists say.

The otaku market, from animation movies to computer games and accessories, totaled 187 billion yen ($1.73 billion) in 2007, according to entertainment research firm Media Create.

But recently, businesses have discovered another type of free-spending Japanese consumer: the female otaku, who tends to be better-looking, trendier, and more sociable than her male counterpart.

One of the defining feature of the female otaku is their love for manga comic books, especially boy-love manga.