In recent years, you may have often seen stories in the media about the unusual service of hiring people in Japan to pose as family members or partners. This has featured heavily in Western media and you don’t have to look far to find articles or news stories where someone has tried it, with even Conan O’Brien trying out the service for a segment on his travel show quite a few years ago. For a long time, odd things in Japan were a staple of Western media and the family rental service is one that still gets wheeled out pretty regularly.
So how common are these kinds of services? In this article, we take a look at the reality of renting a person in Japan, the reasons these services exist and just how popular they really are in Japan.
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How People Rentals Started
The origins of people rental services in Japan are actually very hard to trace. The earliest example of it was thought to have been provided by a company called the Japan Efficiency Corporation in the early 90s who provided professional actors to play the part of family members. Aside from being name checked in some English newspaper articles in the early 90s, it’s actually very difficult to find any Japanese language sources of this particular company ever having existed.
Though similar services have actually existed in other countries for quite some time with South Korea having wedding guest rental services as far back as the 90s and numerous other examples throughout Europe and Asia, it didn’t really start becoming well-known until the early 2000s. This was when the media both in Japan and the west took note of the growing industry in Japan and began reporting on it widely. If anything, this exposure helped drive growth and now there are quite a number of companies that offer various services in renting out people/actors to play specific roles in other people’s lives.
What Do Rental People Do?
The service that is usually talked about the most when it comes to the people rental industry is that of hiring a family, but there are plenty of other services as well. The most popular service is actually hiring guests to attend a wedding in order to make it look larger. Aside from this, there is an abundance of things you can hire people to do. You can hire crowds to attend your gig to make it seem like your band is more popular. You can hire friends or a boyfriend or girlfriend or someone to pretend to be your boss. The options are practically unlimited and most companies will do their best to meet your request. Essentially, they are hiring out an actor and as long as you can think of a role that doesn’t cross specific boundaries, these companies are usually able to arrange it.
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Are they a popular service in Japan?
Just how popular are these services in reality? Well, in proportion to the news coverage they get, not really. This kind of service is very niche and not something you’re ever really likely to run across in day-to-day life. You probably won’t meet someone who’s actually used the service (or will at least admit to it). Most Japanese people also think it’s quite unusual. That said, there’s obviously a market for it and the demand is large enough for multiple companies to exist. Almost all of the rental companies operating in the industry offer a very broad range of services in order to compete within the market though demand will probably continue to grow into the future.
Why Do People Use These Hire Services
The popular discourse around these kinds of services is often that they are a sign of issues of loneliness within society at large. And while there is some merit to this sort of discussion, the actual services offered are so diverse that it’s very difficult to slot them easily into one category.
Many people give different reasons for wanting to use these kinds of rental services. In Japan in particular, where appearances are especially important, hiring somebody to cover for you in certain social situations can definitely help make certain interactions go smoothly. The companies that provide these services often list reasons that people use them on their websites and these reasons can range from very simple to much more complex. The simple reasons are things like wanting someone to accompany them to a concert or even just wanting someone to talk to. You can even hire people just to come to your house and listen to your complaints.
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Other reasons can be more complicated. One case listed on one of the company’s websites talks about a client who needed to hire people to play her parents while meeting her partner’s family. This was to cover for the fact that her own parents were divorced and she had a strained relationship with them. Another case lists someone hiring a person to go on a date with him in a roleplay-type situation. This particular client was looking for a prospective marriage partner and as such, wanted to practise going on dates to smooth out any awkwardness when it came to the real thing. All in all, the reasons for using people rental services are as diverse as the services themselves.
Other Unusual Hire Services in Japan
The people rental service is just one of many unusual hire services that can be found in Japan. These range from renting a pet, right through to services that will quit your job for you. This last one in particular has exploded in popularity in recent years due to the various pressures around traditional working culture in Japan.
Recently, a lot of news articles have been written about a man named Shoji Morimoto, often described as a man who is hired to do nothing. In reality, Morimoto is more like a kind of freelance version of the usual people rental companies available to be hired for a wide range of things from seeing people off at the airport to just having phone calls with them.
The Future
While renting a person is still very much a niche service in Japan, often played for laughs in the media, it’s definitely a growing market. Because these services meet such a wide variety of needs in people’s lives there is a very strong possibility that they will continue to become more popular in future. As our lives become more and more public thanks to the pervasiveness of social media, many people care more about appearances and status. These kinds of factors may play a role in the demand of these kinds of rental services in the decades to come.
