Renting a Friend in Tokyo

http://www.afar.com/magazine/the-incredibly-true-story-of-renting-a-friend-in-tokyo

by daegloe • 10 years ago

193 80 10 years 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• 10 years ago

I have. :) I suspect that it wouldn't lend itself as well to USA culture as it might to Japanese.

mbil• 10 years ago

Well there's this: http://rentafriend.com/

EC12• 10 years ago

Because it's really sad and pathetic.

zeveb• 10 years 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• 10 years 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.

praptak• 10 years 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• 10 years 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• 10 years ago

They do the most important thing - they leave.

pavel_lishin• 10 years ago

You can rent a therapist, which seems to be the primary purpose of these rent-a-friends.

kirykl2• 10 years 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• 10 years 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.

kirykl2• 10 years 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

Thriptic• 10 years ago

Yeah I feel like there were a few dark times in my life when I would have definitely paid for this service; paying someone to go out and have fun with you certainly beats sitting in your apartment drinking alone and feeling bad.

brokencup• 10 years ago

I saw a documentary a few years ago about this called Rent a Family Inc.

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dROyjWHleUs

kazinator• 10 years 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.

hitekker2• 10 years 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• 10 years 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• 10 years 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.

sago2• 10 years 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.

bmm6o2• 10 years ago

I think it has more to do with expectations than the money per se. AirBnB is first and foremost a business relationship, and it's probably common that neither person wants any more out of it. If I hit it off with the host I might recommend them to friends, but actually pursuing a friendship... probably not. Whereas getting to know the hosts is part of the appeal of couch surfing.

As another example, clubs and classes are a great place to make friends because you already have a common interest. You can become friends with the instructor/leader no matter what the monetary arrangements are. Whether there are dues or class fees, if the instructor gets paid a token or reasonable amount. Of course, the more of a profession it is for the instructor, the more likely they are to be spread thin across classes and students. But again, that's not the money per se.

knughit4• 10 years ago

AirBnB pretends to be a social matching service with money just for covering expenses.

nefitty• 10 years ago

This year I'm planning on actively expanding my network by taking advantage of the vibrant nightlife scene here in Vegas. I'm also going to check out any cool meetups I can find, even if they're not 100% in my areas of interest. I think it's important to put oneself out there. If someone really feels valuable as the person they have become/are becoming it's a sort of gift they can give to their community, whether locally or online or what have you.

vigilant• 10 years ago

I've actually experienced the opposite..

With couchsurfing, i've tried both hosting and surfing. Hosting felt like I was managing a free hotel - the guests seemed to have little interest in hanging out or socializing at all. They just stuck to each other. Maybe my mistake was allowing couples instead of individual travellers. I never got a chance to surf, all requests were denied, I get the sense that you basically have to be female and traveling without a partner to succeed in surfing. Context: 29 yr old asian american male, no deformities or anything like that.

With AirBnB, most of the time, it was just a business relationship, but I did form a few friendships which lasted a while.

Of course, anecdotes are not proof - I think it really shows that it is more the luck of the draw than anything else.

codingdave• 10 years ago

I'm not sure you can fairly compare bringing people into your own home vs. short-term stays in other people's homes. The context is completely different.

You might be right that money plays a part, but it is far from the only variable in play.

justifier• 10 years ago

i'll replace this notion of friend with a metric of how much time is spent with a person

i agree with the comment noting expectations, and also want to emphasise that i have spent lots of time with either type of houseguest

but what i have found interesting is it is easier to fall into spending time when the money exchanging hands is roughly the amount i would want to pay for the service

for instance, on airb.. i have set my price on the room i offer both under, on, and over what i myself would want to pay for the room

when i charge less than what i would pay for my space i can get guests that i feel are rude or disrespectful to me, my home, andor my neighbors

if i charge more than i would want to pay for the space, i can get people who have high expectations: arguably, fair expectations on what they get for the price; or are just absent because someone else paid the bill and they are there to work

when i charge a rate that i think would be fair if i were to be paying for the space i find i spend more time with the people

the worst part is when you enjoy the time you spend with people you know are going back home across the country or globe

knughit4• 10 years ago

Right. In GAAP, the technical term for the difference between a business's total assets (minus liabilities) and it's valuation price is "goodwill".

dchmiel• 10 years ago

I've travelled to a LOT of countries and here is my experience using Airbnb and Couchsurfing.

The places that I used couchsurfing are the most memorable. I travelled for a whole year in 09-10 and the 5 times that we used couchsurfing to stay at someone's place was incredible and I'm still in contact with 2/5 of those stays. 40% hit rate I guess. Back then Airbnb wasn't a thing (or wasn't a big thing, can't think at the top of my head when they started) so it was either hostels or couchsurfing. You get different flavours of travel between those two. You meet more travellers in hostels which is a very different trip and experience vs staying with a local and hanging with them. It's interesting to see the perspective change between just the accommodation choice.

This year I travelled for 3 months and since I was working remotely I wanted to make sure I was productive and had my own space to think and do work with good wifi. So that meant NO hostels really. Horrible wifi in them, they're loud and usually dorms meant not a lot of me space. When looking at private hostels compared to Airbnb rentals the price wasn't that much more for a full studio in most cities so I stayed only 3 nights in hostels the whole trip.

Airbnb is great for feeling at home (full kitchen, couches, etc) and having everything you need to be productive and I made sure the wifi was great in each place before booking. But when grabbing the whole place I never interacted with my hosts since they weren't there. I never did stay in a private room so I can't comment on that experience and getting to meet the hosts that way which would probably feel more couchsurfing like.

But I did a hybrid take on my travels. I stayed in Airbnb places but would reach out to couchsurfers to meet up. And the response was so much better when you don't need accommodation since a lot of hosts just get bombarded with automated messages begging for 'free' places to stay. It helped me meet a lot of individuals in every city we stayed and it was the same great feeling when I stayed at people's places on the last trip.

The hybrid approach was pretty awesome and made me not feel lonely since the couchsurfers were a great source of information on what to do and explore and much of the time they did those activities with me.

I am still in contact with many of those couchsurfers from this past trip as well. I've hosted in my place and found that hosting helped connect also. I've never rented out on Airbnb so I can't comment on the other side of that.

mathattack2• 10 years ago

This article doesn't pretend that the friendships are real. They are 100% commercial. They exist because of a personal void that must be filled. If there were non-commercial (free) alternatives, people would be using them.

For better or worse, once I got into my mid-30s, I started wondering about dollar signs in people's intentions in general, unless I met them in the context of a hobby.

sago2• 10 years ago

I used to travel to new cities pretty often for training work, and people I was training would be good at taking me out once or twice. But a few times I thought it would be cool to be able to hire a 'guide' to show me some cool places in the evening: good food, drinks, music. Someone who'd even be up for teaching me a bit of the language, when I'm out of the anglophone world. I wasn't interested in anything romantic, so I never felt brave enough to hire an escort.

I think it would be cool to have this kind of thing: AirBnB for Friends, but I don't think my need was a 'personal void' to be filled, just a function of being a social person with a socially unconducive job.

It may be a personal void for many (perhaps most), but shouldn't have to be.

[Edit:] Also, "wondering about dollar signs in people's intentions", yeah, same, but another reason that a specific transaction wouldn't be a bad thing.

lazyant• 10 years ago

I'll abstract that concept one step further: there can be no friendship if there's any (real or perceived) power difference, like in this case employer and employee.

huac• 10 years ago

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

morgante• 10 years 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• 10 years ago

Interesting

twoquestions2• 10 years 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!

hitekker2• 10 years 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• 10 years 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.

patio113• 10 years 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.)

shostack2• 10 years ago

Hey Patrick, thanks for the additional insight. I had considered moving to Japan at one point in college and studied up on the culture quite a bit, but obviously have no first hand experience like you do.

Two things I've wondered about that I'm hoping you can shed some light on...

First, do people that low on the totem pole socially have any tendencies to emigrate to societies with more open cultures about this stuff like Europe or America? I realize there can be a cost barrier, but even a cashier could save up enough to make the move if they were dedicated enough to the idea.

Second, my experience with cashiers and other service staff there was the expected flawless politeness. But beyond that, people genuinely seemed to want to go above and beyond and take pride in their job, even if it was "just as a cashier." Is my perception due to just not being well-attuned to the social/body cues of the Japanese? In America, the cashier at a 711 typically hates their job and many give off the impression of being a slacker. Some practically exude this. I never once encountered this in a 711 in Japan. So do most of the cashiers there really hate their jobs/status and just make a good show of things? Or am I just blind to the cues?

twoquestions2• 10 years ago

Thank you for your reply, and that only adds to the horror.

I get that my question may have sounded like "Can't these bums just stop complaining and rent a small apartment and live lean?", but I figured if that was an option, they'd do that, but I had no idea why. Thank you for posting as to the reason this doesn't happen.

For a bit of background, both of my roommates work at Wal-Mart, and while they don't enjoy as much spending money as I do they certainly aren't treated like garbage like Japanese convenience store workers are.

welanes• 10 years ago

So damn insightful, this comment. Travelling through Osaka last Autumn and we stumble upon a small underground Reggae bar. We're sharing tales, having fun with the dudes that ran it, and I get conversing with the owner over the last cigarette:

Me: "Cool spot you've got here man. Must be fun?" Dude: "Yes, for bit. But I'm 35."

* Silence*.

He starts telling me about how the novelty has worn off and he's stuck between a rock and a hard place and how wearing hip-hop garb has an expiry date.

I know - these are concerns of young adults everywhere - but found his deadpan awareness of the increasing opportunity-cost interesting (and hilarious, at the time).

rconti• 10 years ago

closes browser and nervously gets back to work

knughit4• 10 years ago

Why can't lower class women marry lower class men? Half of Japnaese are women, right?

I mean, it sucks, but it should suck in a gender balanced way.

dsacco• 10 years ago

> 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!

Plenty of people enjoy Silicon Valley salaries with 40 hour work weeks. I expect that most people with those salaries work closer to 40 hours than 60. In fact, I don't personally know anyone who works more than 50 hours a week unless they're building a startup and it's their baby.

I don't mean to pick on you, it's just that I read things like this...

> 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!

...on HN all the time, and every single time I think to myself, "You can have both!"

I'm not denying that there exist jobs with work-life balances that resemble dystopian hellscapes full of abject misery, but it's just frankly not the norm.

d4rkph1b3r• 10 years ago

but then I see the 90+ hour weeks that are expected

I have never ever heard of this in a SV job unless it's a startup and they have ownership. I see folks working 50 hours a week max.

verst2• 10 years 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• 10 years 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?

verst2• 10 years 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• 10 years 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• 10 years 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

kough3• 10 years 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• 10 years 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• 10 years 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/

SirFern• 10 years 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

Slippery_John• 10 years 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.

pjlegato3• 10 years 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.

kough3• 10 years 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-wo...).

pjlegato3• 10 years 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.

lzecon• 10 years ago

Besides the influx of tech people moving to San Francisco in the last 5-10 years (many of whom disappear in a downswing, ask anyone living in SF for 99-05), I haven't heard or seen anything that suggests the mass adoption of countercultural criticisms have at all influenced social awkwardness or atomization in CA. It's a BIG state.

Renting a Friend in Tokyo

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