“Welcome home, my master!” a young maid in Victorian-styled clothes and bunny ears greets her master and then serves him a meal. This is not just a scene from a Japanese anime; maid cafes recently opened in Hong Kong place their customers on the animation scene.

Maiderland and Maid Date are the first Japanese maid cafés opened in Hong Kong in August. At the café, all customers will be treated as masters by the elegant maids who dress up in Victorian costumes.

Maid café is a real-life cosplay derived from the culture of ACG, a combination of animation, comic and game. The idea is rather new in Hong Kong.

While maid cafés are popular in Japan, the first maid café, Cure Maid Café, was set up in Akihabara, Tokyo in 2001. Other maid cafés soon sprang up and now there are at most 80 maid cafés in Japan. During the last six years, maid cafés have also hit other countries such as Canada, Singapore, and Taiwan.

The local Maiderland is a small-sized café which can accommodate about 10 customers and only opens on weekends. It was originally a short-term maid café started by an ACG interest club at Hong Kong Baptist University. The enthusiasm from the students pushed the café from an interest on campus to a true business.

Unlike the usual practice of cafes, Maiderland was not opened for commercial purposes, but to bring together ACG fans to share their common interests.

“We are enthusiastic, we don’t care much about money,” said Peter Sum, the chief manager of Maiderland, and also a scriptwriter of anime.

Li In, a second year student from Hong Kong Baptist University, is one of the partners and maids of the cafe.

Maiderland also recruits volunteers as maids without salary. As a veteran maid, Li In sometimes needs to teach voluntary maids, mostly ACG fans from secondary schools, how to work.

Voluntary maid Yolan said in her blonde wig, “I am a cosplayer, I think it is interesting and I come here to know more people with common interests; actually I don’t really care about money.”

Most of the food at the café brings images on comic books to real life and is cooked and named accordingly. As Bei, the hostess of Maiderland, introduced a cool blue drink with a pair of glasses inside named as the comic “Mr Desperate” and “Sister Juice” designed for Lolita.

“We like ACG because it can provide us a beautiful world with something magical and inspiring; our translation is just a way to bring something beautiful to our real world,” Li In explained.

 But the café inspired by fantasy also has its humane side as Peter Sum requires his staff to obey the comfort-your-soul rule by which masters are expected to receive warm service from the maids.

Whether an ACG fan or not, the maids try to play games and communicate with their masters. Sky Kuan, an ACG fan from Macao and a loyal fan of Maiderland, said that the maids are like close friends as they play games and read comic books together.

“I am not an ACG fan, but the experience here is different and interesting,” said Wong Pui-chi, a university student in Hong Kong.

While the number of ACG fans in Hong Kong is not huge, Peter thinks it is hard to predict the future of maid cafes in Hong Kong. With newly-introduced Japanese and drawing lessons and the Kimono Festival in November, an exciting event for ACG fans, creativity is what he will strive to sustain in this animated business.