Bondanime offers Japanese cartoons with a fetish edge. It shows Hentai with kinky hardcore themes with sweet young schoolgirls be ravished by beasts and then saved by superheroes to which they show they’re gratitude in rather filthy ways. Anything goes with toons. What you may not know is that bringing these fictional folks to life, even those from mainstream, non-porn Japanese comics is fetish all on its own.

It is called cosplay, which is short for costume play. Very popular already in Japan, it involves adults dressing up like their favorite characters from comics, anime films, television shows and graphic novels. In North America, there has been a growing trend towards dressing up like giant stuffed animals by groups of people who call themselves plushies but less numbers of the sorts of establishments one sees dedicated to indulging customer’s cosplay cravings.

That is until now. According to the site X-rated TV (12/18/06), a new cosplay eatery has recently opened in Scarborough, Ontario, Canada. It mimics almost to the tee the popular cartoon-based format of many of Japan’s restaurants. It’s called iMaid Cafe and although it might sound as if it should be a cleaning accessory for your MP3 player, it actually features female serving staff dressed in French maid costumes.

Before, you begin picturing scantily or suggestively clad waitresses serving hot coffee, let me explain that these uniforms are quite demure rather than raunchy. They imported them from Japan so they are completely authentic to the genre of outfits worn by the servers over there. Although inspired by a Japanese trend, its Chinese owner Aaron Wong chose the concept to compete with the over abundance of other food places with more traditional presentations of fare from China or Hong Kong.

He admits to hiring exceptionally smiley girls with long hair and big eyes to bring to life the cartoon image. I’m not sure how he can so readily admit that since Canada does have rather progressive labor codes regarding hiring practices. Nevertheless, he suggests that his theme-based atmosphere mixed with delicious Hong Kong, Taiwanese and Western food, is a match iMaid in heaven.