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Middle-aged men for rent in Japan
- mikekchar 8y agoI'm middle aged and in Japan. If you want to come and buy me beer, I'll happily chat with you for hours on end :-)
- IIAOPSW 8y agoFriggen ageism. You know how hard it is for me as a young man in Japan to be a middle age man for rent? For real though, given the use-case of the clients, foreigners would be perfect for this job. You can throw anything on them and not worry because they will skip the country soon. Only problem is the language barrier. As someone that is very much here today, gone tomorrow, people have been exceptionally open with me. Maybe I should start renting myself out.
- your-nanny 8y agoI have heard that in Japan a "foreigner" might live in Japan for forty years, be fluent in language, culture, and custom, and yet still called a foreigner and not Japanese; I have heard likewise that that is not the case in Taiwan, ie to be Chinese is to act Chinese. What do you think?
- xevb3k 8y agoAs far as I can tell, it’s not really true any more than in other countries. It’s just really very hard to learn Japanese well, and also to get a good grasp on Japanese culture. The vast majority of foreigners coming to Japan never achieve fluency (from what I can tell, though if there are stats on this I’d be interested).
- CapricornNoble 8y agoI've been living in Japan for 7 years. Some of my friends even longer (12+ years), fluent in Japanese, including keigo (formal/honorific speaking) and local dialects. Even if you develop some life-long friendships, you're still a gaijin. You'll always be a gaijin. ESPECIALLY when interacting with anyone outside your immediate social circle. One friend has a half-Japanese wife and has been here about 15 years. He's finally gotten so fed up with what he feels is disrespect and alienation from a VERY large population of objectively dumber/less ambitious/less successful human beings that he's actually considering moving back to America. One incident that set him off on a day-long tirade (he was under a LOT of stress at the time) was when he pulled up to a drive-thru to order, he made some jokes with the staff, and I'm sure the staff thought they were talking to a Japanese guy. Then he pulls up to the window....and the Japanese staff are staring at a big black Jamaican man......and they just stared, speechless...then began chatting amongst themselves about how surprised they were. They had totally forgotten their formal customs and courtesies that any service staff would say if they were interacting with a Japanese customer. He blew up, cursed them out in Japanese, demanded to see their manager, scolded the manager in Japanese, etc....
- reacweb 8y agoA japanese guy went in France for studies. After his studies, he said he would be considered as a foreigner his whole life if he went back to work in japan.
- kalleboo 8y agoNo idea about Taiwan but I know Asians in the US (a country where 99.1% of the population are descended from immigrants) who complain about getting the question "but where are you REALLY from" a couple times too often. I think this is a problem in any place with any kind of homogeneity, which Japan has a lot of.
- IIAOPSW 8y agoAs a white guy, I've occasionally run into the sort of person that quizzes you about ancestry. Usually they'll take a guess like "are you Italian" and when they don't get it right away they fall back on "well what are you?". I can't recall if I've gotten this with the exact words "but where are you REALLY from?". I think I may have. For some reason this is part of some people's conversational diet. It fills the void in the same way as "so what do you do?" I too have heard my Asian friends complain about it. I legit don't know if Asian American's actually have this nuisance worse or if they are just more aware of it. I don't even know where to find data to prove it one way or the other.
- jerf 8y agoI remember seeing in one of those "The Things That Will Really Surprise Visitors About $COUNTRY" type articles for the US that in most of the world, "where are you from?", either in the sense of location or what family you come from, is one of the standard conversations openers or early topics, whereas the US is actually unusual in that you'll very often here "what do you do?" (i.e., what is your job) in that conversational position.
- nonstopmath 8y agoIf you look sufficiently Asian (in American sense), then in China you're Chinese until proven otherwise. Inability to speak Mandarin/Cantonese/whatever is no proof you're not Chinese :) If you speak English, they'll look you up and down with contempt(presumably to see if you have any signifiers you're from Europea or something) :D Well, this is just my anecdotal experience as someone from a -stan country visiting China. Probably, partly why they (along with Koreans) prefer white Europeans with barely sufficient English over Asian (or even black) English majors born and raised in America.
- IIAOPSW 8y agoI think the only country where you can truly become not-a-foreigner are the young countries (US, Canada etc) because we simply haven't been around long enough to define our national identity on ancestry. Every other country does define itself on ancestry (some more nationalistic than others). Don't get me wrong, your presence can become very much accepted and even appreciated, but you're always wai guo ren / gai jin. I'm struggling to think of a solid example right now. I haven't lived in Taiwan. Do they call us laowai in Taiwan or is that just a mainland thing?
- graeme 8y agoCanada is the same as the US, maybe more so. I'm guessing Australia and New Zealand are similar.
- qkls 8y agoYou can become a not-a-foreigner in many European countries if you are white and speak without an accent. On the flipside, you can be classified as a foreigner even if you'd live your whole life in the country but aren't white.
- HelloNurse 8y agoIt depends, many European countries are ethnically diverse enough that appropriately dressed people of many ethnicities can look like natives; on the other hand many immigrants, including very ethnically aligned ones, look like immigrants even after one or two generations.
- robjan 8y agoMost Taiwanese don't consider themselves to be Chinese but I get your point. Yes it's true is most Asian countries but that's because they tend to be very racially homogenous and anyone who is not part of said group is a foreigner. In Hong Kong, for example, every Caucasian is a gweilo (lit. ghost guy).
- your-nanny 8y agowell since race is mostly a western construct, I suppose you mean most Asians are racially Asian. But I'm really not so sure that you can say Asia is very homogenous, culturally, ethnically, or genetically. Indeed, the issue wrt being Chinese is that the history of China is one of a enculturation into Chinese culture of a diverse set of groups throughout the mainland... where being Chinese is about acting Chinese more than it is about genetic and geographical roots.
- robjan 8y agoI meant that individual Asian countries (especially in East Asia) are usually homogenous e.g. most people in Japan are Japanese, Korea Korean, China Chinese etc. So much so that often race and nationality are conflated.
- mikekchar 8y agoActually, I just realised that "foreigner for rent" (especially young foreigner) is a very real thing: English lessons. I can't tell you the number of people I know that make a living of showing up at a coffee shop and chatting to people in English for $20 an hour. Most clients are just lonely people who happen to speak a little English.
- YCode 8y ago> Urban citizens may be desperate to get advice from an older, wiser person, but they don't want to turn to the guy they've worked with for years or the uncle who remembers the tears shed over a broken toy truck. Someone familiar might judge them. Maybe it's a cultural difference, but excepting dysfunctional relationships the idea that your close friends and family are the wrong people to give you advice is almost dystopian.
- CamTin 8y agoIn the US, we have the understanding bartender or wise taxi driver stereotype. This seems like largely the same thing: somebody with some perspective on your situation because they aren't too bogged down with the minutiae of actually knowing you very well who can "buck you up" or dash off an insight that your spouse or friends can't.
- S-E-P 8y agoThey make you comfortable as they attempt to give insight to something they don't understand, but it's not too personal and since they know little about you, there's not much room for judgement. Kind of like a one night stand, same principle (though much like a real relationship is much more rewarding, it's also a lot more work, the parallels here are fairly apparent)
- jerf 8y agoYeah. It's amazing how much good you can do for someone just listening to them. It's "rubber duck debugging" in our industry, but the principle can be applied to your general life too. It's also amazing how much good you can do for someone by just listening to them for a bit, and then deploying the correct platitude. No originality, no great wisdom, just the right thing said at the right time, from someone whom the listener doesn't have years of emotional callouses, defenses, and preconceptions built up to prevent them from hearing the simplest of words without hearing the echos of years past. With a bit more effort you can do even better, of course; I'm not trying to oversell the goodness. I'm saying the bang for the buck can be surprisingly good for people.
- holstvoogd 8y agoI find it funny how they basically value the marginally informed opinion of a researcher in the USA over the word of someone actually involved in the story へ‿(ツ)‿ㄏ
- nicolas_t 8y agoYes, that jumped out at me too :)
- andrewl 8y agoSabine Fruhstuck, the professor interviewed, appears to be more than marginally informed: http://www.eastasian.ucsb.edu/people/faculty/sabine-fruhstuck/ http://www.eastasian.ucsb.edu/people/faculty/sabine-fruhstuc... Her specialty area is listed as Modern Japanese Cultural Studies. She's researched and written on sexuality in Japan, Japanese military culture, Japanese leisure culture, men's issues, and more. I think a foreign researcher who had spent a career immersed in my culture (I live in the United States) could well have more insight into how pieces of it fit together than I would.
- fenomas 8y agoI imagine GP may have meant "marginally informed" about the company specifically - the article makes it sound like her judgment of it is based its website.
- amarant 8y agoit's also funny how that researchers name is the german word for breakfast. I couldn't help imagining the journalist interviewing a bowl of cereals
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- low 8y agoMy friend said he used this service to buy daily necessities when he was in hospital. He also said it was pretty useful. (I and he are both Japanese.)
- vfc1 8y ago80% of the users are women, and according to the researcher: ..."All of this indicates to me that this is likely a casual dating site without saying so," she said, adding that "sex and romance" could be an "expectation on all sides involved." Looks like the creator of the site wrote a dating column, so a sort of undercover hiding in plain sight dating website, that could be a simple explanation.
- bittercynic 8y agoMaybe I'm being naive, but it seems reasonable to think that many people are using this service for purposes that don't include romance or sex.
- pinebox 8y agoShades of the "NEEDED: Generic Father Figure for Backyard BBQ" Craigslist ad.
- wufufufu 8y agoThese kinds of "look how weird Japan is!" articles are an unintentional personal attack on an entire country. And the articles always come up more frequently in the software engineering / computer science social scene. > Though it started slow, his website has roughly 45 ossan rentals a day now, or 10,000 encounters per year Really? That's it? There are no statistics on the rate of occurrence of this per population, yet this researcher has taken it upon them to tell the whole world that middle-aged men are for rent in Japan. Someone should research why Americans have an infatuation with a few cultural aspects of Japanese culture. And it's always things like "young people don't want to date!" or "you can buy hentai at vending machines". Anecdotally, some Americans fetishize these aspects of Japanese culture, and I think that skews everyone's perceptions of the country. I think some fraction of Americans want so bad for Japan to be as weird as the anime they watch. Everyone I've met from Japan seems completely normal in relation to these articles.
- wvenable 8y agoDon't worry the rest of the world has a similar infatuation with American culture, with the same biases, and the same "everyone I've met from America has been normal" phenomenon.
- wufufufu 8y agoPlease, let me continue to fantasize about morbidly obese gun-toting Americans
- throw2016 8y agoThere is undeniably a fetishization of other cultures in the media which creates the 'other' especially for those who are only casually interested and whose exposure is via the media - ie most people unless you are a researcher or professional paid to take an interest. But this taking a small isolated thing and presenting it as some kind of general thing is typical of most media. They do these human interest or trend related stories and try to present the singular instance as something bigger than it is. Most fashion media 'manufacture' and push trends in the same manner usually funded by product or service providers. For instance guys using manbags or guys grooming beyond basics, this usually applies to a small minority but its presented as something larger, and sometimes it even becomes one.
- ilaksh 8y agoMakes me think I should start a website called Rent-A-Dad featuring experienced looking model types in the home page. Aimed at lonely single mothers.
- Kagerjay 8y agothey have cuddle rooms as well, so this doesn't really surprise me either