It's a cold winter's night in Tokyo and 'Mariel' is on her way to work. Painfully underdressed for the weather, the 21-year-old is decked
out in a black-and-white Victorian maid's costume that barely covers the tops of her brown thighs. Named after a character from one of Japan's most popular anime cartoons, Hanaukyo Maid Team - about a rich boy who has a huge staff of maids at his beck and call - Mariel will spend her six-hour shift playing a passive host to shy, geeky men who she will address as 'master'. To the men, she is Mistress Mariel: obedient, erotic and hopelessly out of their league.
Ride around the points of Tokyo's circular Yamanote railway line on a Friday night and you will find the usual human flotsam winding its way down into the weekend: drunken salarymen hunting cut-price kicks in east Shinjuku; giddy high-school students roaming the youth playground of Shibuya; office ladies window shopping along the upmarket boulevard of Harajuku; and star-crossed couples hovering around the love hotels of Ikebukuro. However, get off at Akihabara, to the northeast of the loop and an area squeezed between the staid bookselling district of Kanda and Ueno Park, and you will find a different breed of thrill seeker.
Here, the crowds are overwhelmingly male and single, the dress code is a mix of parkers, backpacks, sensible shoes and thick glasses, and the prize is not a drink or a date, but the latest animated character or computer game. The favourite pit stops are cafes where waitresses in frilly pinafores with names such as Strawberry and Pudding greet customers with an ear-splitting 'Welcome home, master!'
You have entered Otaku-land. Once the centre of Japan's electronics retailing industry, the area has been transformed over the past decade into a sort of nerd's paradise, catering to the country's growing ranks of otaku: geeks who obsessively pursue a single hobby such as collecting anime characters, video games and toys. Once viewed with suspicion because of its association with odd, sometimes sex-obsessed loners, otaku culture has grown into an almost mainstream, billion-dollar industry, spawning its own language, customs and cast of deeply eccentric characters.
Toshio Uchiyama hoards autographed cards of his favourite 'maidens': women who work in the dozens of so-called maid cafes - boasting names such as Cafe Doll Tokyo, Wonder Parlour and Curio - that have sprung up in the area since 2000. Today, the part-time ryokan (Japanese hotel) clerk is sitting in Angels Cafe doodling a cartoon of a doe-eyed anime character in the visitors' book. The cartoon is excellent; almost feminine in its attention to detail and Uchiyama is looking for words of praise. Sweating beneath thinning hair, he looks up shyly as a young waitress dressed in a frilly Victorian maid outfit approaches.