At science fiction convention WisCon, a group of Japanese feminist otaku staged a piece of performance art that mocked Japanese "maid cafes" where male otaku go to be waited on by women in maid outfits who chat with them about manga. A group of women dressed in white lab coats wound giant keys mounted on the backs of two women dressed as maids and one dressed as a geisha. About twenty of us sat around tables and talked about mad science while the wind-up geisha performed a robotic tea ceremony and the maids handed out red bean sweets. Occasionally, the robots would make mistakes and the mad scientists would apologize profusely to us about how they needed to do more work on the robots.
One of the architects of the event was Kotani Mari, who in 1994 won Japan's most prestigious science fiction award and suffered weeks of abuse in the press when commentators suggested her husband must have written the novel because no woman could write science fiction as well as she did. Since her experience, she has established an award in Japan for science fiction authors whose novels deal with gender issues. A similar award in the United States, the Tiptree Award, announces its winners at WisCon.
