Billed as “forever 17,” Hitomi Shiga is a legend in maid cafe culture in Tokyo’s Akihabara district.

While dressing up in a maid costume and treating customers as masters and mistresses is her passion, Hitomi, as she prefers to be called, is also a firebrand when it comes to crime prevention efforts.

She single-handedly spearheaded efforts to protect fellow “otaku” geeks and keep the neighborhood safe following a horrific incident nearly two decades ago that left seven people dead.

Rewinding the tape, Hitomi was in senior high school when she saw a TV program about a maid cafe in 2004 and yearned to wear a pink maid outfit.

She soon started working at At-Home Cafe, which had just opened.

Back then, Hitomi never felt completely safe at night due to the proliferation of gloomy alleys in Akihabara.

By the time she left work, many shops had closed for the day, and the streets were littered with cigarette butts and trash.

NEW ERA WITH AKB48

But everything drastically changed the following year.

The Akihabara-based all-girl idol group AKB48 stormed onto the music charts, and “Densha Otoko” (Train Man), a TV drama series about an anime-obsessed otaku and his attempts to woo a woman he met on a train, was a smash hit.

Practically overnight, Akihabara was the center of idol and otaku culture trends.

In the business year ending in March 2005, the average daily number of passengers using JR Akihabara Station was 142,000 

Just two years later, the figure surpassed 200,000.

By then, maid cafes were attracting a wider range of clientele and Hitomi found herself busier than ever.

“Moe,” a slang word that refers to having a strong affection--or even a fetish--for characters from anime, video games or other fictional works, emerged as one of 10 contenders for a grand prize for “new words or buzzwords” as it symbolized Akihabara at the time. A group of maids, including Hitomi, received a prize for the word.

Growing acceptance of subculture genres helped Akihabara, with its reputation as an “electronics town,” to become more vibrant.

Hoping to draw more people to Akihabara and its maid cafes, Hitomi started organizing trash-picking and other community activities.

But a dark shadow descended on the district in June 2008 after a man rammed his truck into an area designated as a pedestrian-only zone on Sundays and holidays and started stabbing people, killing seven.

As a result, the pedestrian precinct concept was scrapped. It remained that way for the next two years and seven months, during which time the number of visitors to Akihabara noticeably dropped off.

With the district associated with mayhem in the minds of many people, the number of first-time customers at Hitomi’s maid cafe plummeted by about 30 percent.

Determined to revive Akihabara, she concentrated on cleanup and other community endeavors.

Eventually, Akihabara regained its vibrancy as a sightseeing spot that is also popular with foreign visitors.

Like other downtown areas, Akihabara then began facing a new social problem as young people there found themselves being unwittingly recruited for illegal part-time jobs and falling prey to gropers.

Hitomi joined hands with younger maids to appear in a promotional video introducing measures to help young people fend off shady job offers and protect themselves from perverts.

They also distributed promotional fliers and actively participated in other crime-prevention activities.

“With the help of Hitomi and her legendary popularity, we can call on those who we normally cannot approach and provide them with crime prevention information,” said Noriaki Toyoda, chief of the Manseibashi Police Station, which oversees Akihabara.

In June, Hitomi and other maids underwent self-defense training at the police station to protect themselves and their customers from unsavory individuals.

Previously, customers were mostly men at At-Home Cafe.

But now, women make up more than half of the customers.

“I think it is beginning to become known that Akihabara is safe and secure,” Hitomi said. “I will continue to work hard to ensure that everyone, me included, my colleagues, masters and mistresses, can spend time at ease.”

Looking back on how the capital of otaku culture has changed over the past 20 years and her life as a maid, Hitomi, who now represents 600 maids working in Akihabara and raises two children, feels it is crucial for everyone to help each other to maintain safety in the entertainment district.,

In spring, she received a letter of appreciation from the Metropolitan Police Department for her longtime contributions to safety activities.

“I will keep trying so that Akihabara will always be a place where anyone can come back anytime,” Hitomi said.

(This article was written by Noriki Nishioka and Shomei Nagatsuma.)