Word: swallowtails
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CARACAS In the Venezuelan capital, buyers scoop up Lenox's Butterfly Meadow Tiger Swallowtail...
...little explanation: the Swallowtail is a "butler café," a Tokyo restaurant staffed entirely by Japanese facsimiles of English manservants, down to the formal tails, white gloves and gracious manners. That's the first cultural oddity. Here's the second: Swallowtail is for women--specifically the burgeoning numbers drawn to manga and anime (Japanese comics and animation), a world that usually caters to slightly antisocial male obsessives. These women are known as otome (their male counterparts are called otaku), which roughly means "maidens," and their tastes run to the medieval fantasies found in their favorite manga, which explains why some...
...door to the Swallowtail opens and there stands Saionji, good man that he is, as skilled a butler who ever buttled. He takes our coats and bags and shimmers away, leading us down the corridor past gilded mirrors, Monet prints and bursting bouquets to our table in the Swallowtail's elegant tearoom. As I move to sit at our table, a second butler, named Mikami, materializes to ease me into my chair. "Good day, princess," he says to my dining companion--and not, I assume, to me. I order the Earl Grey tea and the Macbeth--a petite...
...desire to live like a manga character gave rise to "maid cafés," staffed by waitresses dressed in extreme French-maid outfits. The possibility that women might want a tearoom of their own prompted a group led by Yoko Otsuka, 29, a pleasantly bookish young woman, to create Swallowtail, Tokyo's first butler café. Since Swallowtail opened last March, customers have lined up for reservations. The café tripled its space in October, but tables are still booked solid. The most ardent customers come daily and might never leave if Otsuka hadn't put an 80-minute limit on reservations...
...while the cakes are delicious, the appeal for regular clients is clearly in the service. Swallowtail gives otome a chance to act out their fantasies--say, to be a princess with a footman for teatime--but there may be something even more basic behind its success. Tokyo is a hard town, and it can be even harder for women. Under pressure to conform and marry--which often means surrendering much of their independence--they face a daily battle against the sexism that still pervades Japan, where fewer than 10% of corporate managers are female. The butler caf?...