12 ms·

Renting a Friend in Tokyo

193 points by daegloe 11y ago

JoeAltmaier 11y ago
In the USA we have everything but this - you can rent an assistant, a concierge, a translator, a wedding planner, a prostitute. But not a friend. Why have we not thought of this?
- jaxomlotus 11y ago
  I have. :) I suspect that it wouldn't lend itself as well to USA culture as it might to Japanese.
- mbil 11y ago
  Well there's this: http://rentafriend.com/ http://rentafriend.com/
- EC1 11y ago
  Because it's really sad and pathetic.
  - zeveb 11y ago
    Wouldn't it be sadder and even more pathetic to be lonely and refuse to take action to alleviate that loneliness even a little, for even a short time?
  - partisan 11y ago
    I really wish this for you: May you never be lonely enough in your life to consider something like this, but if you ever find yourself at such a point in your life, then at that point, the weird feeling you would feel when pondering the dilemma of someone who would pay for friendship, that feeling is called empathy.
    - EC1 11y ago
      Then I guess I don't have any because I'm perfectly content being alone. Being around others isn't very stimulating.
      - realbarack 11y ago
        Alone != lonely
- praptak 11y ago
  There's this message about true friendship & true love neither of which can be bought. I think it's pretty strong in Western culture. That's why we also don't rent spouses and even renting a prostitute has pretty bad vibe.
- chimeracoder 11y ago
  > you can rent a prostitute. But not a friend. Why have we not thought of this? Escorts don't just do sex work. In addition to sex, this is a good deal of what escorting is, depending on who one's clients are and what they are looking for.
  - sre_ops 11y ago
    They do the most important thing - they leave.
- pavel_lishin 11y ago
  You can rent a therapist, which seems to be the primary purpose of these rent-a-friends.
kirykl 11y ago
I wonder if repeat business is a problem. The article mentions a fake engagement, which isn't really a friend just a way to appease his parents. Paying to rent a friend could be useful for things like that. But for real friendship I think it would get depressing real fast
- diskcat 11y ago
  >I think it would get depressing real fast Well people do pay for cuddles and companionship. It's like when you aren't really that hungry you won't eat that slightly off 1 week old chicken but if you are hungry and nothing else is available it doesn't seem like such a bad idea.
  - kirykl 11y ago
    Cuddles and I assume you mean the stronger version of companionship seem to be physically comforting. Paying someone solely to behave like we have a trusting bond, that they care that I exist, is paying someone to lie to me. That's more invasive mentally than an hour of physical contact
    - logfromblammo 11y ago
      I might pay someone to play tabletop board and card games with me one night a week. That's pretty much what I would do with actual friends anyway. And if I were paid to do the same, I'd think that's a pretty good gig--unless the friendship contract stipulated a certain frequency of letting the boss win, of course. I don't need much of a trusting bond. Just eat my snacks, drink my drinks, laugh at the 10% of my jokes that actually deserve it, and take your weekly card-table curbstomping without much more than a token amount of complaints. If I were single, I might also hire a wingman or blocker to back me up at the local meet market venues.
    - moron4hire 11y ago
      IDK, I suspect half the time, my real friends and I are pretending to like each other, to maintain polite relationships for the other half of the time that we actually do enjoy each other. What I mean is, nobody actually wants, needs, or should have 100% pure honesty all the time. Does it matter if the 3.5 days out of 7 that someone puts up with my cantankerous nature is to have access to my money or the other 3.5 days that I'm shaved and showered and generally pleasant?
brokencup 11y ago
I saw a documentary a few years ago about this called Rent a Family Inc. Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dROyjWHleUs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dROyjWHleUs
kazinator 11y ago
If you find this interesting, I recommend the thriller Noriko's Dinner Table [2005]. The film's plot revolves an agency "IC Services" that rents out people to play roles---they play roles as family members in family life.
hitekker 11y ago
Being a Couchsurfing host (Free) in NYC and an AirBnB traveler (paid), I believe a long-term meaningful friendship cannot form while money is changing hands. In my experience, money calls into question the sincerity and authenticity of both the person paying, and the person being paid. Authenticity being "are they being themselves?", and sincerity being "do they want you to know themselves?" and vica versa. Is a person being friendly because they like me or because they are counting the dollar signs in their head? Do they really want to get to know me or are they simply being polite, i.e. applying social lubricant? I don’t have a single host from my AirBnB stays that I remember fondly, if at all. I have several Couch-surfers who I miss dearly and who message me from time to time on Facebook. I feel that it’s possible to make real friends with people you start with on a “business level”, but until that “business” gets removed, the relationship is just a thin veneer over what is essentially a transaction.
- jd007 11y ago
  maybe money has something to do with it, but the way the two websites are marketed/positioned definitely plays a role as well, as it creates a bias in the hosts. couchsurfing is marketed as "a great way to meet locals", as a way to find new friends, so people who list their places on it are more likely to be interested in making friends with their stayers. airbnb is mostly positioned as a "turn your home into a hotel" website, so many airbnb hosts operate it like a business and are not necessarily looking to make friends with the clients.
- roymurdock 11y ago
  Counter anecdote: Made some great friends through AirBNB when I rented an apartment for a few months in NY. We had a tradition where we would grill up different meals every Sunday on the back patio. After I left, the guy on the lease got a cat and named her Sunday. I still drop in when I'm in the area and we BBQ and trade tales. I think the length of the stay makes a big difference. Overall I agree that it is self-defeating to directly pay for a friend. But you can find friends everywhere, even (indirectly) at the opposite end of business transactions.
- sago 11y ago
  Another data point on the other side: an AirBnB host I met in LA and I hit it off, and are still friends years later. We're not 'close' exactly, because we live opposite sides of the world, but we're in touch often, we cheer on the achievements of each other's kids and share our harebrained schemes.
huac 11y ago
Apparently Tinder is a good way to (platonically?) meet locals in Asia.
- morgante 11y ago
  For a foreigner, yes absolutely. In most of Asia it's still easy to find people who would be interested to meet you. I can imagine it being difficult for locals to meet other locals though (if they're shy and socially awkward).
known 11y ago
Interesting
massemphasis 11y ago
That is what they get for trying to fit in with the Europeans and whites. They remind me of the Asians in the US that try to hang out with the whites, black, etc... It is a sad sight. That is why the Chinese in the US are doing much better than the Koreanas and the Nipponese. They are much stronger and don't need to fit in with the lesser cultures. The Koreanas and the Nipponese are just conquered Territories to the Americans. The US bombed and killed millions of civilians in their countries. No wonder they are depressed.
- dguaraglia 11y ago
  ... And we spotted the racist. Asians trying to mingle with other ethnicities is sad? Chinese are strong but everyone else is weak? Are you for real or are you just a Microsoft Tay instance?
  - massemphasis 11y ago
    Yea... Try and spin it on me in this forum, when the reality speaks for itself. They are just being taken advantage of by trying to hang out and fit in with a heavily antagonistic culture that is very racist against Asians. The amount violence the US inflicted on those Asians is enormous and unequal. And, I didn't even mention that the JNippons and Koreanas are genetic cousins to the native Americans, many of which were wiped out by the US. The long-term trend is just apparent in where the US and Russians are taking the direction of those Asians.
    - uremog 11y ago
      The reality I see is that I had to select your text to even read it.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - huac 11y ago
twoquestions 11y ago
Is it common and expected to give literally all of your time to the boss, with no time left for friends or family? If so, what are they working for? Is working as a cashier or janitor literally worse than dying over there? I mean sure you won't have the money that comes from working for a big corp, but at least you'll have some time that isn't 'on the clock'. I mean I'm a 9-5 programmer who likes to learn off-hours and sometimes I'm envious of the Silicon Valley salaries, but then I see the 90+ hour weeks that are expected along with the rent you unfortunate souls have to pay, and all I can think is NOPE! I'd rather make somewhat less money so I can have at least some choice in my life rather than be completely owned by my boss like some kind of indentured servant! This whole scenario seems really terrifying! After reading that article I seriously physically felt like I just read a really good existential horror story. My skin is still crawling!
- hitekker 11y ago
  I once had a CouchSurfer/systems-engineers friends who hosted over 400 travelers in Tokyo over the course of a few years. He told me he did so because IBM, his company, gave him 0, absolutely 0 vacation time. He only could visit the U.S. once he quit IBM.
- uremog 11y ago
  >>> Is it common and expected ... In Japan, yes. Unpaid overtime is still normal, though the government is trying to cut back on it via laws, etc. As far as the other questions go, idk. But you hear about things like negative population growth, husbands who never talk to their kids, wives who are basically house servants, shut-ins, etc. Though nothing can be called THE reason for any of this, all of this stuff is connected through culture.
- patio11 11y ago
  Is working as a cashier or janitor literally worse than dying over there? If you're a Japanese man raised by middle class parents, the prospect of working as a cashier or janitor implies: You will never have economic security. Substantially all cashiers are hourly contract workers; virtually all janitors are. (The janitorial exceptions are government employees.) Contract workers can have their employment terminated in a fashion similar to in the United States. This contrasts markedly with the traditional expectation of the Japanese middle class, which is lifetime employment. Your parents will consider you a failure, principally because you have failed in the one thing men are expected to do. You will find your dating and marriage prospects markedly curtailed. You will be considered a loser by the vast majority of young women who you wish to date. Some will tell you that, in as many words. Many will prefer euphemisms like "My ideal boyfriend is someone who has debuted in society." Honest labor as a cashier is not considered honest labor in the Japanese middle class, at least not for a member of the middle class. Japan is a very status-conscious society. Cashiers and janitors occupy some of the very lowest rungs of it. You will spend most of your day being obseqiously polite to people; you will watch other people spend their fragments of your day snubbing you, repeatedly, in the ordinary course. You have recently read of other blue-collar employees who worked service jobs dying cold and alone, because the government safety net doesn't really consider them a priority, they had no savings, and they never had a family for the above reasons. So, tell me: given that this is your mental model of reality, and the mental model shared by substantially everyone you consider a peer or mentor, how attractive does working at 7-11 sound to you? Oh, salient fact: if you work so much as one day at 7-11 past college you'll probably never work as a salaryman. You're damaged goods for the rest of your life. If you thought of maybe doing it for 6 months while spending your time playing in a band and then getting on with your adult life, go ask one of the 45 year olds working at 7-11 and living on ~$1,400 a month how that decision worked out for them. The above math, or something close to it, is why most salarymen consider themselves blessed to be proper employees at a stable corporation, even if that job is actively killing them. (n.b. I'm not Japanese but I am a recovering Japanese salaryman. "Salaryman" is a local coinage which identifies full-time white collar employees of a certain strata of Japanese companies which are desirable to work at. The traditional expectation is that you sign a deal with the devil ^H^H^H^H^H your company where the company insulates you from all risks and in return you commit to the company mind, body, and soul.)
verst 11y ago
I have personally used something similar when traveling a few places in Asia. For example, in Seoul, South Korea I found this organization of university students who want to promote their culture and improve their English in the process. I didn't want to do the typical tourist things with my colleagues, so I had two students take me around the city for a day. They were willing to tailor their tour and activities entirely to my interests. In fact, they didn't even expect me to pay for their food or things like admission tickets to museums. I certainly wasn't going to let some university students pay for me (especially when those things were comparatively cheap to me as a foreigner). I decided to rely entirely on their recommendations as locals. I had a great time! I am inclined to organize something similar in San Francisco for tourists from across the world - meet new people and show them around for free (showing off your local pride).
- ZenoArrow 11y ago
  > "I am inclined to organize something similar in San Francisco for tourists from across the world - meet new people and show them around for free (showing off your local pride)." I've not used the service yet, but I get the impression this is often what happens with Couchsurfing, is this something you'd be interested in trying?
  - verst 11y ago
    I prefer having my own private space at the end of the day, so Couchsurfing isn't quite for me. But during the day or evenings I'd be happy to show people some cool spots I like (which they will probably like).
- ceras 11y ago
  This sounds really cool. I'm visiting Seoul soon and would love to try this -- do you remember how you found this group?
Legogris 11y ago
VICE did a take on LGBT culture in Japan and one of these services is part of an incredibly moving episode at the end: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnrAISE6x08 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnrAISE6x08
kough 11y ago
> It’s not that people lack friends, she says. Facebook, Instagram— scroll around and you find a country bursting with mugging, partying companionship. It just isn’t real, that’s all. “There’s a real me and a masked me. We have a word for the lonely gap in between that: kodoku.” I find this to be incredibly true in the US as well. I'm a university student, and there is a marked difference between how I know my friends are feelings vs. how they post on social media. I went through a long period of depression a few years ago because (for a variety of reasons) I was isolated from most of my good friends. Spending tons of time with them on social media didn't make me happy. It was confusing, feeling like I was still in touch with all my friends but at the same time not getting any of the usual positive emotions. There's really nothing like human companionship. EDIT: I say "how my friends post on social media" because I stopped using it. I'll log in and skim every once in a while but I stopped posting about myself entirely a few years ago. Instead, I try to call or email my friends. For some reason, email feels much, much more personal than Facebook. I've really gotten to know some of my friends better by writing back and forth with them. Different media inspire different conversations, I guess.
emodendroket 11y ago
Kodoku 孤独 is just the Japanese word for "solitude" or "loneliness," not necessarily "the lonely gap between the real me and the masked me."
nickbauman 11y ago
There's a movie about this called, literally Rent-a-Friend by Eddy Terstall, It's dutch, and it's actually worth watching. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0201888/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0201888/
SirFern 11y ago
Vice has a good segment on the "love industry" in Japan. Details why the culture has lost interest in marriage and has begun partaking in more forms of recreational affection. http://www.vice.com/video/the-japanese-love-industry http://www.vice.com/video/the-japanese-love-industry
Slippery_John 11y ago
What an amazingly awful website. A solid 60% of the page is taken up with crap. Then you have a massive leading image, and tons of unnecessary images. Then a horizontal bar displaying an ad across the whole screen. "That's the end of the article" you might think. This would be supported by the paragraph above said being deceptively conclusive. But no, it goes on even farther.
pjlegato 11y ago
Most of the population of Japan were sad, angry, and humiliated in 1945. They blamed traditional society (in general) for having failed them. The result was that most people discarded traditional social value systems and customs on a wholesale basis. The traditional ways of interacting with others began to be seen as horribly old-fashioned, conservative, imperialist, stodgy, and above all profoundly unfashionable. However, they failed to create a coherent new system of customs and values to replace the ones they discarded. The result was the atomization of society, the lack of the shared mores, norms, and contexts that traditionally produced the conditions necessary to find friendship. Something very similar happened in California with the mass adoption of countercultural criticisms of traditional society in the 1960s and 1970s, which now manifests as a sort of pervasive social awkwardness and atomization. The trend lags a few years behind Tokyo, but I imagine before too long, San Francisco too will have "rent-a-friend" services to fill the void created by the lack of shared social mores and customs that traditionally allowed people to make friends.
- kough 11y ago
  I can't comment on the societal changes of post-WWII Japan, but I see what you've described playing out right now in the US. There is a lot to dislike about American "traditional values" (like, I don't know, racism? sexism? tons of things) but as more and more people lose these traditional values and the social networks that came with them (e.g., church), I think we'll see this play out the same way in the US. It's already starting -- there was a great article in the Atlantic a few months ago that's well worth reading (http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/01/white-working-class-poverty/424341/ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/01/white-wo...).
  - pjlegato 11y ago
    Any human-made system is bound to have both good and bad in it -- including all new propositions for replacing traditional systems. Humans aren't perfect and never will be. The problem is that the baby is too often thrown out with the bathwater. Specific criticisms of specific areas, however valid they may be, are almost imperceptably broadened, bit by bit, year by year, until they become categorical condemnations of "traditional society" ("the Man") in general, no longer in regard to any specific thing but as a generic reified abstraction to be combatted.

193 points by daegloe 11y ago

In the USA we have everything but this - you can rent an assistant, a concierge, a translator, a wedding planner, a prostitute. But not a friend. Why have we not thought of this?

jaxomlotus 11y ago
I have. :) I suspect that it wouldn't lend itself as well to USA culture as it might to Japanese.
mbil 11y ago
Well there's this: http://rentafriend.com/ http://rentafriend.com/
EC1 11y ago
Because it's really sad and pathetic.
- zeveb 11y ago
  Wouldn't it be sadder and even more pathetic to be lonely and refuse to take action to alleviate that loneliness even a little, for even a short time?
- partisan 11y ago
  I really wish this for you: May you never be lonely enough in your life to consider something like this, but if you ever find yourself at such a point in your life, then at that point, the weird feeling you would feel when pondering the dilemma of someone who would pay for friendship, that feeling is called empathy.
  - EC1 11y ago
    Then I guess I don't have any because I'm perfectly content being alone. Being around others isn't very stimulating.
    - realbarack 11y ago
      Alone != lonely
praptak 11y ago
There's this message about true friendship & true love neither of which can be bought. I think it's pretty strong in Western culture. That's why we also don't rent spouses and even renting a prostitute has pretty bad vibe.
chimeracoder 11y ago
> you can rent a prostitute. But not a friend. Why have we not thought of this? Escorts don't just do sex work. In addition to sex, this is a good deal of what escorting is, depending on who one's clients are and what they are looking for.
- sre_ops 11y ago
  They do the most important thing - they leave.
pavel_lishin 11y ago
You can rent a therapist, which seems to be the primary purpose of these rent-a-friends.

kirykl 11y ago

I wonder if repeat business is a problem. The article mentions a fake engagement, which isn't really a friend just a way to appease his parents. Paying to rent a friend could be useful for things like that. But for real friendship I think it would get depressing real fast

diskcat 11y ago
>I think it would get depressing real fast Well people do pay for cuddles and companionship. It's like when you aren't really that hungry you won't eat that slightly off 1 week old chicken but if you are hungry and nothing else is available it doesn't seem like such a bad idea.
- kirykl 11y ago
  Cuddles and I assume you mean the stronger version of companionship seem to be physically comforting. Paying someone solely to behave like we have a trusting bond, that they care that I exist, is paying someone to lie to me. That's more invasive mentally than an hour of physical contact
  - logfromblammo 11y ago
    I might pay someone to play tabletop board and card games with me one night a week. That's pretty much what I would do with actual friends anyway. And if I were paid to do the same, I'd think that's a pretty good gig--unless the friendship contract stipulated a certain frequency of letting the boss win, of course. I don't need much of a trusting bond. Just eat my snacks, drink my drinks, laugh at the 10% of my jokes that actually deserve it, and take your weekly card-table curbstomping without much more than a token amount of complaints. If I were single, I might also hire a wingman or blocker to back me up at the local meet market venues.
  - moron4hire 11y ago
    IDK, I suspect half the time, my real friends and I are pretending to like each other, to maintain polite relationships for the other half of the time that we actually do enjoy each other. What I mean is, nobody actually wants, needs, or should have 100% pure honesty all the time. Does it matter if the 3.5 days out of 7 that someone puts up with my cantankerous nature is to have access to my money or the other 3.5 days that I'm shaved and showered and generally pleasant?

brokencup 11y ago

I saw a documentary a few years ago about this called Rent a Family Inc. Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dROyjWHleUs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dROyjWHleUs

kazinator 11y ago

If you find this interesting, I recommend the thriller Noriko's Dinner Table [2005]. The film's plot revolves an agency "IC Services" that rents out people to play roles---they play roles as family members in family life.

hitekker 11y ago

Being a Couchsurfing host (Free) in NYC and an AirBnB traveler (paid), I believe a long-term meaningful friendship cannot form while money is changing hands. In my experience, money calls into question the sincerity and authenticity of both the person paying, and the person being paid. Authenticity being "are they being themselves?", and sincerity being "do they want you to know themselves?" and vica versa. Is a person being friendly because they like me or because they are counting the dollar signs in their head? Do they really want to get to know me or are they simply being polite, i.e. applying social lubricant? I don’t have a single host from my AirBnB stays that I remember fondly, if at all. I have several Couch-surfers who I miss dearly and who message me from time to time on Facebook. I feel that it’s possible to make real friends with people you start with on a “business level”, but until that “business” gets removed, the relationship is just a thin veneer over what is essentially a transaction.

jd007 11y ago
maybe money has something to do with it, but the way the two websites are marketed/positioned definitely plays a role as well, as it creates a bias in the hosts. couchsurfing is marketed as "a great way to meet locals", as a way to find new friends, so people who list their places on it are more likely to be interested in making friends with their stayers. airbnb is mostly positioned as a "turn your home into a hotel" website, so many airbnb hosts operate it like a business and are not necessarily looking to make friends with the clients.
roymurdock 11y ago
Counter anecdote: Made some great friends through AirBNB when I rented an apartment for a few months in NY. We had a tradition where we would grill up different meals every Sunday on the back patio. After I left, the guy on the lease got a cat and named her Sunday. I still drop in when I'm in the area and we BBQ and trade tales. I think the length of the stay makes a big difference. Overall I agree that it is self-defeating to directly pay for a friend. But you can find friends everywhere, even (indirectly) at the opposite end of business transactions.
sago 11y ago
Another data point on the other side: an AirBnB host I met in LA and I hit it off, and are still friends years later. We're not 'close' exactly, because we live opposite sides of the world, but we're in touch often, we cheer on the achievements of each other's kids and share our harebrained schemes.

huac 11y ago

Apparently Tinder is a good way to (platonically?) meet locals in Asia.

morgante 11y ago
For a foreigner, yes absolutely. In most of Asia it's still easy to find people who would be interested to meet you. I can imagine it being difficult for locals to meet other locals though (if they're shy and socially awkward).

known 11y ago

Interesting

massemphasis 11y ago

That is what they get for trying to fit in with the Europeans and whites. They remind me of the Asians in the US that try to hang out with the whites, black, etc... It is a sad sight. That is why the Chinese in the US are doing much better than the Koreanas and the Nipponese. They are much stronger and don't need to fit in with the lesser cultures. The Koreanas and the Nipponese are just conquered Territories to the Americans. The US bombed and killed millions of civilians in their countries. No wonder they are depressed.

dguaraglia 11y ago
... And we spotted the racist. Asians trying to mingle with other ethnicities is sad? Chinese are strong but everyone else is weak? Are you for real or are you just a Microsoft Tay instance?
- massemphasis 11y ago
  Yea... Try and spin it on me in this forum, when the reality speaks for itself. They are just being taken advantage of by trying to hang out and fit in with a heavily antagonistic culture that is very racist against Asians. The amount violence the US inflicted on those Asians is enormous and unequal. And, I didn't even mention that the JNippons and Koreanas are genetic cousins to the native Americans, many of which were wiped out by the US. The long-term trend is just apparent in where the US and Russians are taking the direction of those Asians.
  - uremog 11y ago
    The reality I see is that I had to select your text to even read it.
- deleted 11y ago
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- deleted 11y ago
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- huac 11y ago

twoquestions 11y ago

Is it common and expected to give literally all of your time to the boss, with no time left for friends or family? If so, what are they working for? Is working as a cashier or janitor literally worse than dying over there? I mean sure you won't have the money that comes from working for a big corp, but at least you'll have some time that isn't 'on the clock'. I mean I'm a 9-5 programmer who likes to learn off-hours and sometimes I'm envious of the Silicon Valley salaries, but then I see the 90+ hour weeks that are expected along with the rent you unfortunate souls have to pay, and all I can think is NOPE! I'd rather make somewhat less money so I can have at least some choice in my life rather than be completely owned by my boss like some kind of indentured servant! This whole scenario seems really terrifying! After reading that article I seriously physically felt like I just read a really good existential horror story. My skin is still crawling!

hitekker 11y ago
I once had a CouchSurfer/systems-engineers friends who hosted over 400 travelers in Tokyo over the course of a few years. He told me he did so because IBM, his company, gave him 0, absolutely 0 vacation time. He only could visit the U.S. once he quit IBM.
uremog 11y ago
>>> Is it common and expected ... In Japan, yes. Unpaid overtime is still normal, though the government is trying to cut back on it via laws, etc. As far as the other questions go, idk. But you hear about things like negative population growth, husbands who never talk to their kids, wives who are basically house servants, shut-ins, etc. Though nothing can be called THE reason for any of this, all of this stuff is connected through culture.
patio11 11y ago
Is working as a cashier or janitor literally worse than dying over there? If you're a Japanese man raised by middle class parents, the prospect of working as a cashier or janitor implies: You will never have economic security. Substantially all cashiers are hourly contract workers; virtually all janitors are. (The janitorial exceptions are government employees.) Contract workers can have their employment terminated in a fashion similar to in the United States. This contrasts markedly with the traditional expectation of the Japanese middle class, which is lifetime employment. Your parents will consider you a failure, principally because you have failed in the one thing men are expected to do. You will find your dating and marriage prospects markedly curtailed. You will be considered a loser by the vast majority of young women who you wish to date. Some will tell you that, in as many words. Many will prefer euphemisms like "My ideal boyfriend is someone who has debuted in society." Honest labor as a cashier is not considered honest labor in the Japanese middle class, at least not for a member of the middle class. Japan is a very status-conscious society. Cashiers and janitors occupy some of the very lowest rungs of it. You will spend most of your day being obseqiously polite to people; you will watch other people spend their fragments of your day snubbing you, repeatedly, in the ordinary course. You have recently read of other blue-collar employees who worked service jobs dying cold and alone, because the government safety net doesn't really consider them a priority, they had no savings, and they never had a family for the above reasons. So, tell me: given that this is your mental model of reality, and the mental model shared by substantially everyone you consider a peer or mentor, how attractive does working at 7-11 sound to you? Oh, salient fact: if you work so much as one day at 7-11 past college you'll probably never work as a salaryman. You're damaged goods for the rest of your life. If you thought of maybe doing it for 6 months while spending your time playing in a band and then getting on with your adult life, go ask one of the 45 year olds working at 7-11 and living on ~$1,400 a month how that decision worked out for them. The above math, or something close to it, is why most salarymen consider themselves blessed to be proper employees at a stable corporation, even if that job is actively killing them. (n.b. I'm not Japanese but I am a recovering Japanese salaryman. "Salaryman" is a local coinage which identifies full-time white collar employees of a certain strata of Japanese companies which are desirable to work at. The traditional expectation is that you sign a deal with the devil ^H^H^H^H^H your company where the company insulates you from all risks and in return you commit to the company mind, body, and soul.)

verst 11y ago

I have personally used something similar when traveling a few places in Asia. For example, in Seoul, South Korea I found this organization of university students who want to promote their culture and improve their English in the process. I didn't want to do the typical tourist things with my colleagues, so I had two students take me around the city for a day. They were willing to tailor their tour and activities entirely to my interests. In fact, they didn't even expect me to pay for their food or things like admission tickets to museums. I certainly wasn't going to let some university students pay for me (especially when those things were comparatively cheap to me as a foreigner). I decided to rely entirely on their recommendations as locals. I had a great time! I am inclined to organize something similar in San Francisco for tourists from across the world - meet new people and show them around for free (showing off your local pride).

ZenoArrow 11y ago
> "I am inclined to organize something similar in San Francisco for tourists from across the world - meet new people and show them around for free (showing off your local pride)." I've not used the service yet, but I get the impression this is often what happens with Couchsurfing, is this something you'd be interested in trying?
- verst 11y ago
  I prefer having my own private space at the end of the day, so Couchsurfing isn't quite for me. But during the day or evenings I'd be happy to show people some cool spots I like (which they will probably like).
ceras 11y ago
This sounds really cool. I'm visiting Seoul soon and would love to try this -- do you remember how you found this group?

Legogris 11y ago

VICE did a take on LGBT culture in Japan and one of these services is part of an incredibly moving episode at the end: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnrAISE6x08 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnrAISE6x08

kough 11y ago

> It’s not that people lack friends, she says. Facebook, Instagram— scroll around and you find a country bursting with mugging, partying companionship. It just isn’t real, that’s all. “There’s a real me and a masked me. We have a word for the lonely gap in between that: kodoku.” I find this to be incredibly true in the US as well. I'm a university student, and there is a marked difference between how I know my friends are feelings vs. how they post on social media. I went through a long period of depression a few years ago because (for a variety of reasons) I was isolated from most of my good friends. Spending tons of time with them on social media didn't make me happy. It was confusing, feeling like I was still in touch with all my friends but at the same time not getting any of the usual positive emotions. There's really nothing like human companionship. EDIT: I say "how my friends post on social media" because I stopped using it. I'll log in and skim every once in a while but I stopped posting about myself entirely a few years ago. Instead, I try to call or email my friends. For some reason, email feels much, much more personal than Facebook. I've really gotten to know some of my friends better by writing back and forth with them. Different media inspire different conversations, I guess.

emodendroket 11y ago

Kodoku 孤独 is just the Japanese word for "solitude" or "loneliness," not necessarily "the lonely gap between the real me and the masked me."

nickbauman 11y ago

There's a movie about this called, literally Rent-a-Friend by Eddy Terstall, It's dutch, and it's actually worth watching. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0201888/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0201888/

SirFern 11y ago

Vice has a good segment on the "love industry" in Japan. Details why the culture has lost interest in marriage and has begun partaking in more forms of recreational affection. http://www.vice.com/video/the-japanese-love-industry http://www.vice.com/video/the-japanese-love-industry

Slippery_John 11y ago

What an amazingly awful website. A solid 60% of the page is taken up with crap. Then you have a massive leading image, and tons of unnecessary images. Then a horizontal bar displaying an ad across the whole screen. "That's the end of the article" you might think. This would be supported by the paragraph above said being deceptively conclusive. But no, it goes on even farther.

pjlegato 11y ago

Most of the population of Japan were sad, angry, and humiliated in 1945. They blamed traditional society (in general) for having failed them. The result was that most people discarded traditional social value systems and customs on a wholesale basis. The traditional ways of interacting with others began to be seen as horribly old-fashioned, conservative, imperialist, stodgy, and above all profoundly unfashionable. However, they failed to create a coherent new system of customs and values to replace the ones they discarded. The result was the atomization of society, the lack of the shared mores, norms, and contexts that traditionally produced the conditions necessary to find friendship. Something very similar happened in California with the mass adoption of countercultural criticisms of traditional society in the 1960s and 1970s, which now manifests as a sort of pervasive social awkwardness and atomization. The trend lags a few years behind Tokyo, but I imagine before too long, San Francisco too will have "rent-a-friend" services to fill the void created by the lack of shared social mores and customs that traditionally allowed people to make friends.

kough 11y ago
I can't comment on the societal changes of post-WWII Japan, but I see what you've described playing out right now in the US. There is a lot to dislike about American "traditional values" (like, I don't know, racism? sexism? tons of things) but as more and more people lose these traditional values and the social networks that came with them (e.g., church), I think we'll see this play out the same way in the US. It's already starting -- there was a great article in the Atlantic a few months ago that's well worth reading (http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/01/white-working-class-poverty/424341/ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/01/white-wo...).
- pjlegato 11y ago
  Any human-made system is bound to have both good and bad in it -- including all new propositions for replacing traditional systems. Humans aren't perfect and never will be. The problem is that the baby is too often thrown out with the bathwater. Specific criticisms of specific areas, however valid they may be, are almost imperceptably broadened, bit by bit, year by year, until they become categorical condemnations of "traditional society" ("the Man") in general, no longer in regard to any specific thing but as a generic reified abstraction to be combatted.