Winner and Still Heavyweight Champion of the World . . . Japan

The pretty maids are lined up in a row, offering to take your coat or hand you a menu, all with a little bow and a rapid batting of lashes. The service comes with a smile, but it's the costumes they are wearing that endear them to their largely male clientele.

Each is dressed in the white-and-black frilly uniform of a French maid, cut short on legs provocatively covered in black pull-up hose. . . .

"They are not just waitresses," says owner Aaron Wang, a 24-year-old Beijing native who left China six years ago to study at York University. "They are friendly, always smiling, they treat the customer like he was in his own home."

Mr. Wang has taken this year off from studying economics to launch the café, which opened in July. In Asia, he says, the trend has been growing exponentially since the first maid café (or meido) appeared in Tokyo's Akihabara district in 2000. . . .

In Japan, the trend is to call the customer "master." But Mr. Wang says Chinese people would find that appellation "too weird."

And so at iMaid Café (which caters to a mostly Chinese clientele thanks to its location near Kennedy and Finch), the young women who work there have a different greeting: "Shang-di." It translates as "God."

'Cause that's not weird, at all.

You know, Japan* has become the heavily doped East German swimmers of the Freaky Olympics. They set a new record for freaky every time they enter the pool. Seriously, at this point, if someone told me fetishists there were injecting gasoline into their bladders, and lighting their urine streams to give their partners hot golden showers, I'd believe it (and I'd be searching the Web for video, because, as you know, I love the funky: that's how I roll).

We should probably petition the UN for an intervention -- but not just yet. Let's hold off till we see if they'll take the bait on this hot golden showers thing.

* Yes, I realize the cafe in question is owned by a Chinese citizen, but the idea for it was taken from the Japanese, so they get the credit.