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The Booming Japanese Rent-a-Friend Business (theatlantic.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report on The Atlantic which talks about a growing business in Japan wherein you can pay an actor to impersonate your relative, spouse, coworker, or any kind of acquaintance. The reporter has interviewed Ishii Yuichi, CEO of a Family Romance, a company that rents such actors. Yuichi believes that Family Romance, and other companies that provide a similar service can help people cope with unbearable absences or perceived deficiencies in their lives. In an increasingly isolated and entitled society, the chief executive officer predicts the exponential growth of his business and others like it, as a la carte human interaction becomes the new norm. An exchange between Yuichi and the reporter, from the story: Morin: When was your first success?
Yuichi: I played a father for a 12-year-old with a single mother. The girl was bullied because she didn't have a dad, so the mother rented me. I've acted as the girl's father ever since. I am the only real father that she knows.
Morin: And this is ongoing?
Yuichi: Yes, I've been seeing her for eight years. She just graduated high school.
Morin: Does she understand that you're not her real father?
Yuichi: No, the mother hasn't told her.
Morin: How do you think she would feel if she discovered the truth?
Yuichi: I think she would be shocked. If the client never reveals the truth, I must continue the role indefinitely. If the daughter gets married, I have to act as a father in that wedding, and then I have to be the grandfather. So, I always ask every client, "Are you prepared to sustain this lie?" It's the most significant problem our company has.
Yuichi: I played a father for a 12-year-old with a single mother. The girl was bullied because she didn't have a dad, so the mother rented me. I've acted as the girl's father ever since. I am the only real father that she knows.
Morin: And this is ongoing?
Yuichi: Yes, I've been seeing her for eight years. She just graduated high school.
Morin: Does she understand that you're not her real father?
Yuichi: No, the mother hasn't told her.
Morin: How do you think she would feel if she discovered the truth?
Yuichi: I think she would be shocked. If the client never reveals the truth, I must continue the role indefinitely. If the daughter gets married, I have to act as a father in that wedding, and then I have to be the grandfather. So, I always ask every client, "Are you prepared to sustain this lie?" It's the most significant problem our company has.
I am always amazed, impressed, disgusted, disbelieving, aghast, saddened, at the level of the Japanese culture of repressing emotions, guilt, refusing to speak things plainly, and bottling things up.
Leads to some great things, admittedly, but also sometimes very saddening!
The mere existence of such a business is a strong indication for the need of some society-wide social engineering and an improvement in mental health care.
I'd pay to read good comments here.
it's always been a thing...
When I saw the headline, I was going to come here and post a joke about the "world's oldest profession". But after reading the summary/article, I'm really saddened. Every family has skeletons in their closets, but this deception goes right to the core of who we are as humans.
"Just as there is nothing so unreal as reality TV, there is nothing as unsocial as social media." - Alistair Dabbs
is LIES!!!???
This is different from much of modern business how exactly?
Don't forget to upgrade your friend rental to include a dog on the side.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
I live in Japan for 2 years. Great place, but there are some odd goings on, such as renting friends. One of the more interesting things in Japanese culture is the way in which they conduct business deals: they are all done in the evening over drinks in bars. This is referred to as "mizu shobai", literally the water trade. One wanders around the bars in or near the business districts of any Japanese city of size and men in business suits (salaryman) are out in vast numbers doing their bit.
Japanese don't see the world the way westerners do, obviously. They tend to see things in terms of being in a team than alone. There is no "I", "me", "mine" much in Japanese culture. They embody the teamwork ethic very well. It's a plus and a downfall for obvious reasons.
Japanese food is outstanding, their snacks and goodies fantastic. Their cartoons and manga are the best. Their electronics are fantastic. You'll see things in Japan and then they'll turn up 5 years later everywhere else.
Japanese smoke everywhere. This was not a problem for me, a smoker.
Taxis are clean, efficient, and relatively inexpensive.
It's fun going down the seaport areas where there are long, winding dock roads. Young Japanese low-riders (bosozuku) will attend in great numbers with their tricked-out cars and motorcycles. It's an odd mix of girls and guys who all look to be extras in a Blade Runner-esque movie.
Japanese women are friendly, but not easy sexual targets like western women. They like a bit of courting. Prostitution and hard core (full nudity) pornography are highly illegal and will get anyone time in the "monkey house" (prison). And yes, they take it deadly seriously. This stuff does exist, but it's treated akin to illegal drugs in America--it's kept largely out of sight, and damn harder to acquire should you roll that way.
A DUI, if you drive, will end your life as you know it. You'll spend years in prison. Fighting with a Japanese citizen will result in the same.
While not as strict as Singapore, the Japanese penal system isn't something with which you want to be acquainted.
All in all , a great country to live in or visit. I'm looking forward to going back.
People in fake realities shouldn't throw stones. Your space is fake. Your Earth is flat.
...Just when I think we've reached the limits of how crazy fucked-up the Japanese can be, they show me I'm wrong.
Keep shining, you crazy Japanese.
-Styopa
Serious question, especially for the author of the parent comment, since he understand Japan so well: how is the service in TFA different from an escort service?
If you pay someone to be a father, for the life, that includes some serious commitment. Next to that, paying a woman to be your girlfriend for a night or a weekend pales to insignificance.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Ours are euphemistically called escort services.
Where I live we have inflatable 'friends' for various purposes, not the least of which is to sit in the passenger seat while driving in the fast 'ride share' lane.
...omphaloskepsis often...
I remember reading that in the Gilded Age everybody who wasn't destitute had multiple servants because it was so cheap to them. Lots of folks looking for any work they can get their hands on.
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Interesting thing about the US is that the mother would be due child support from the actor. Someone doesnâ(TM)t have to be biological, married or even adopt the kid to be nailed with the judgement. If the court sees a father figure in the kids life, thatâ(TM)s all that is required (see: judgements against non-biological ex-boyfriends)
I wonder how much that 12-year old paid to rent a father, because, 12-year olds don't really have a lot of money.
The term in the sex trade I believe is "girlfriend experience". In addition to having sex with you the sex worker will also spend time pretending to love you. Since it's a higher level of service it naturally costs more.
I find the notion that something like that exists poignant. Although prostitution where it exists outside the protection of law is alarmingly exploitative, I have no fundamental objection to trading a few minutes of physical pleasure or relief for money. But creating a counterfeit experience smacks of an infantile retreat from the difficulties of genuine relationships.
In a world full of lonely people, the solution would seem to be obvious. But genuine intimacy requires risk and compromise. Compromise is increasingly a dirty word in our culture, but we fetishize risk, which is just another side of the same coin. A fetish isn't real; the kind of risk intimacy exposes you to *is* real. Nobody can disappoint, hurt or betray you like someone you love. But take away the danger, and what do you have left?
I don't have as much of a problem with playing a role where society conventionally expects someone to come with a date say, but I do have a huge problem with counterfeiting an important relationship, especially on a nonconsenting party: e.g., pretending to be a child's parent. And it comes down to the pain which only people you love can inflict on you.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I'm no expert on Japanese culture, but the glimpses Westerners get to see are...quite interesting. Between this and robotic female companions going semi-mainstream, it seems like there may be a couple of social screws that need tightening. I wonder if selling human interactions, beyond the obvious oldest profession, will be a thing when people don't have manual labor to fall back on.
In my opinion, and it's just an opinion, this is what happens when you have a culture where high achievement is celebrated, but not everyone gets to participate fully. You're just expected to have an outward appearance of success, and I can imagine that can be hard for someone who really isn't meeting expectations. I've heard of this among Ivy League college students...they act like nothing fazes them even if they're struggling like mad to keep up with their peers. The ones who were the smartest kids in their high school get dropped into an environment where _everyone_ is either the smartest or most well-connected kid in their peer group.
I read about an interesting trait of Japanese society...that of lifetime employment. Apparently, large corporations only hire new graduates and if you miss out on it, you never get another chance because they do not hire experienced employees. Talk about having to keep up appearances...imagine not meshing with the crowd for whatever reason and ending up working in a convenience store the rest of your life even if you were an engineering student.
What happens when he has a scheduling conflict between two roles he has to play?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Even though this is certainly an extreme example (at least for me, not sure in Japan), lack of attachment to others and fake appearances are surprisingly common in most of societies. Internet and the way in which things like "social" media have evolved is a good reflection of that reality. Lots of people are not interested in actually knowing others, but only in blindly following trends, getting temporary certainty via poor information about everyone, having a high number of likes, friends, references, showing that they are happy/sad/angry, etc. Similar ideas apply to the real-life routines of many people, who are so scared of really giving and getting something (and, consequently, potentially losing/being hurt) that prefer to be systematically involved in meaningless relationships with others.
Some people might consider me some kind of hermit since some time ago, a person not able to enjoy the small pleasures of life or others' companion. This isn't true. The reality is that I am only interested in getting involved in somehow meaningful relationships, but most of people are not. Should I join the big circus of hypocrisy, meaning-nothing conventions, playing-very-safe-and-as-instructed and lies to eventually find just one worthy person? No, thanks. I did that in the past and know where it ends: tolerating more lies, hypocrisy, in-case-of-doubt attacks, unreasonable prejudices, etc. From my current position, I don't see a big difference between this article and what happens almost everywhere: people living to show and to do/be scared/angry/happy/etc. as instructed by whatever trend or convention, rather than really having/enjoying/experiencing. I don't even find any of this sad anymore.
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
I'm pretty sure I've been doing some of these roles for free. Time to start charging.
The term in the sex trade I believe is "girlfriend experience". In addition to having sex with you the sex worker will also spend time pretending to love you. Since it's a higher level of service it naturally costs more.
I speak from a lack of experience, but...isn't that the basically difference between a prostitute and an escort? The former will have sex with you, and that's it. The latter will go to an event with you, or out to dinner, or even spend the weekend. While sex may be part of the deal, it's really the full companionship package that you are paying for.
That said, I agree with your comment about nonconsenting participants. The case mentioned in TFS is a horrible fraud played on the child. It is entirely likely that she will discover this at some point, and the feelings of betrayal will be huge.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Your space is fake.
Myspace is real. It's just outdated.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Wish we had that here. Could finally have a reason to step out of my mother's basement!
n/t
Have gnu, will travel.
Chicken or egg? Which came first, the gun, or the culture?
I don't have as much of a problem with playing a role where society conventionally expects someone to come with a date say, but I do have a huge problem with counterfeiting an important relationship, especially on a nonconsenting party: e.g., pretending to be a child's parent. And it comes down to the pain which only people you love can inflict on you.
Interesting you say this, because I know of several folks who's parents pretended to be "married", and pretended to be "parents", and by counterfeiting these important relationships probably inflected an unbearable level of pain on their non-consenting children. Other than divorce money (and perhaps some payments to lawyers and therapists), no money was exchanged for the privilege...
Just sayin' counterfeiting relationships happen in real life today, and actors are not even involved. One might questions if it is ethical, but don't pretend that similar levels of damage aren't being done today on a much larger scale by consenting adults. Who knows a rent-a-dad might be better than a real dad in some of these cases...
Funny, the manga Skip Beat has an actress working a job like this on the side, and I thought it was just a made-up occupation.
(Of course, it'd be even funnier if the idea for the business came from reading Skip Beat.)
Let me remind you that nearly every major bank was knowingly selling mortgage backed securities backed by junk mortgages prior to the crash of 2008. Many of those same banks were robo-signing foreclosures without verifying their paperwork, many homeowners had their homes stolen from them through foreclosure, even though they’d never missed a payment, some we’re foreclosed by banks that did not even own the mortgage anymore.
Shall I start on the investment broker business next? Just this year they had new rules requiring them to act in thier client’s best interests ripped up. So I’ve covered about 20% of the U.S. economy, need I go on?
You ARE a hermit. We've read your manifesto. :-)
LOL. Perhaps you are right. But I am a peaceful and live-and-let-live one and my situation doesn't come out of rejection (society seems to accept me pretty much; at least, the version it wants to see which I am not interested in showing), but out of not seeing what I like. Or, in other words, the only unabomber-like character in my case could be society (a group wanting to forcibly make me part of their circus?). So, I might be a properly-speaking hermit, but certainly not a violent version (= NOT unabomber).
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
I think you're reading too much into the "girlfriend experience" thing. Do you like your sex to be affectionate? Or matter-of-fact?
What they're describing in the article is considerably more involved than that.
a group wanting to forcibly make me part of their circus?
I think that a better version would be: lying and coming up with ridiculous reasons explaining why I might not want to deal with them rather than actually trying to understand those reasons, even just listening/reading what I am expressly saying that I want, and becoming what I want or simply accepting my position. Actually, I have been sharing lots of information about myself lately in many places, my posts here among them; as a way to facilitate the understanding of my kind-of-heterodox expectations and to minimise everyone unnecessarily wasting time. The most ironic part is that that attitude seems to have provoked a relevant increase of pointless behaviours targeting me?! People not just not understanding what I am saying in its proper sense, but also coming up with the most ridiculous conclusions! Something like "you say that you are honest + I know that nobody is honest => I assume that you are double dishonest"!!
All that crazily stupid evolution has further confirmed my hermit position. In fact, when I firstly started to wonder why I should tolerate hypocrisy and empty social interactions, I was kind of expecting to be proven wrong and people's behaviours to help me understand my error. But what I found was the definitive confirmation (not just once, many times) of something not being right with modern society's "social interactions"! Openly saying what you want being interpreted as right the contrary because of nobody-says-openly-what-they-want or I-feel-afraid-of-anyone-different-than-me kind of prejudices?! What I have been seeing lately is so unbelievable unrealistic that I could even say that have been harassed by an in-denial "society" wanting me to like it!
"Unabomber" (well... it said "uni-bomber"! tiny prejudice/complex over there?) said the poor anonymous coward scared of a clearly-identified guy, being different than it but openly and reasonably explaining his position, what made it come up with the first random idea somehow justifying such a heresy (in fact, not even that: just a familiar category where my behaviour might be included)! Another kind-of-telling-a-lot issue is implying that I might have ever anything to do with weapons!! Only a person closely related to the use of force/weapons (police, military, hunter or similar) or coming from a weapon-friendly country like the USA can intuitively think that weapons (or other form of violence) are an immediate, intuitive, making-any-sense-at-all resource for a random person to deal with a random situation. I haven't ever had any kind of contact with weapons or thought about dealing with them! But it is kind of telling that someone might bring weapons/violence into picture from the "I don't like you and want to be alone" ideas underlying my original post! Is perhaps that AC reacting violently to people not liking it? Is this AC usually trying to force others to like it! So much irony! Anyway, I have preferred to further extend my not-too-descriptive first reaction to that AC nonsense.
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
"The whole point of getting rich is to be able to stop working and enjoy your life properly. "
For some, the issue of obtaining wealth is about *control* and not leisure. It can be about control of others (e.g. ordering around paid servant or perhaps influencing others in society via media or such). Or it can be about having control over what you can work on yourself (e.g. open source volunteerism).
There are probably other reasons people pursue wealth or status -- including fear of poverty (e.g. perhaps someone being motivated to become US President after growing up in a broken home).
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
He's got a job for life.