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The Booming Japanese Rent-A-Friend Business

theatlantic.com

121–130 of 265 posts

Re: The Booming Japanese Rent-A-Friend Business

#121
horrible interview. Who cares about actors playing as your spouse or whatever.

Why didn't interviewer get into the logistics of being able to rent a human infant!? This is perhaps the most inconceivable aspect of this business.

Any guesses on the logistics and safety protocols for renting one's infant?

Re: The Booming Japanese Rent-A-Friend Business

#122

horrible interview. Who cares about actors playing as your spouse or whatever. Why didn't interviewer get into the logistics of being able to rent a human infant!? This is perhaps the most inconceivable aspect of this business. Any guesses on the logistics and safety protocols for renting one's infant?

Probably the same as already exist for when you rent* one's infant to modelling agencies or film sets?

Re: The Booming Japanese Rent-A-Friend Business

#123
post #49

Went into reading this article expecting it to be a one-off, rental boyfriend type deal (that kind of trope is used very frequently in movies/tv shows/manga there), but this way way deeper than I expected. I'm pretty mind blown at how far they are taking this fake/real replacements. Pretty close to some dystopian scifi actually. >If the client never reveals the truth, I must continue the role indefinitely. If the dau…

Now imagine a future technology where you could undergo some hypnosis / gaslighting treatment to forget you even hired this person. I.e. pay a lot of money in advance, it's invested and the actor gets paid from the interest. You undergo memory treatment, and now your mother who you see once a week is real as far as you know, but really she's an actor you hired years back because your actual mother died.

You might begin to suspect all your close friends are really just paid actors if that became possible...

Re: The Booming Japanese Rent-A-Friend Business

#124
post #91
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand within that culture an apology must be made, and there's a ritual to apology that has to be observed, but I don't understand why an employer would be willing to put up with the ruse. Is there really no social or cultural stigma involved with paying to have someone else to do it on your behalf?

The implication I believe is that the company is large enough that the boss would not personally know all the employees. The actor is pretending to be an employee that is responsible for the mistake that the hiring party made, but is not pretending to actually BE the person who hired them.

Or, the client company never met the employee responsible for the service company’s error (they were just tracked down by an internal investigation in the service company) and so theoretically the service company could have sent anybody and the client company wouldn’t have known the difference. The service company wants to send the error-committer, because going through this process is a punishment of sorts; but the client company doesn’t know/hasn’t met who they’re being sent, so the error-committer can fake things along the way.

They could probably correct the problem by just sending an escort along with the error-committer, but maybe this kind of thing doesn’t happen enough for them to really care.

Re: The Booming Japanese Rent-A-Friend Business

#125
Reminds me of one of the main plot lines of Noriko's Dinner Table http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0468820/

The main character works for a similar company to the one mentioned in the article. Not sure if there was a precedent at the time of the film's writing. Looks like fiction has become reality.

Re: The Booming Japanese Rent-A-Friend Business

#126
post #69

In Japanese business culture, there is a situation where you have to visit a company and say I’m deeply sorry for what I did and just bow and bow. Usually, I accompany a salaryman who made a mistake. I take the identity of the salaryman myself, then I apologize profusely for his mistake. Have you seen the way we say sorry? You go have to down on your hands and knees on the floor. Your hands have to tremble. So, my cl…

I don't mean to be insensitive but that is straight up bizarre behavior. In what way does Japanese business culture benefit from this? I'm open to ideas that it does add something.

I don't know if it's helpful but I can give two examples where it's harmful. In both cases the intense hierarchical culture actively obstructs bad news.

1. Asiana crash. Copilot did not want to tell pilot the approach looked wrong, and they flew into the ground. https://thediplomat.com/2013/07/asiana-airlines-crash-a-cock...

2. Fukushima and Tepco. Nobody wanted to say, "oops we messed up, might want to evacuate." http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-18718486

Re: The Booming Japanese Rent-A-Friend Business

#127
post #123
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now imagine a future technology where you could undergo some hypnosis / gaslighting treatment to forget you even hired this person. I.e. pay a lot of money in advance, it's invested and the actor gets paid from the interest. You undergo memory treatment, and now your mother who you see once a week is real as far as you know, but really she's an actor you hired years back because your actual mother died.

You might begin to suspect all your close friends are really just paid actors if that became possible...

Yeah have you noticed how your friends are always checking the time discreetly and tend to meet you and suddenly need to leave on the hour or the half-an-hour?

Re: The Booming Japanese Rent-A-Friend Business

#128
post #12

Went into reading this article expecting it to be a one-off, rental boyfriend type deal (that kind of trope is used very frequently in movies/tv shows/manga there), but this way way deeper than I expected. I'm pretty mind blown at how far they are taking this fake/real replacements. Pretty close to some dystopian scifi actually. >If the client never reveals the truth, I must continue the role indefinitely. If the dau…

Same here. I can't help but wonder about the ethical implications of lying to a child about something so fundamental for her entire lifetime.

It’s common to lie to children about religious dogma. Society is currently still accustomed to lying about fundamental issues.

Re: The Booming Japanese Rent-A-Friend Business

#129
post #101
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. I can't help but wonder about the ethical implications of lying to a child about something so fundamental for her entire lifetime.

We generally think it's ethically acceptable not to tell a child that they were adopted for a long while (possibly into adulthood), or not to tell a child that their biological father wasn't their mother's husband. We also find it ethically acceptable for a couple not to ask who fathered their own child. We also generally find it ethically acceptable to form and especially continue relationships based on factors othe…

> We generally think it's ethically acceptable not to tell a child that they were adopted for a long while (possibly into adulthood), or not to tell a child that their biological father wasn't their mother's husband.

I would strongly favor honesty in both those situations once the child is mature enough to understand, except, in the latter case, when it's clearly in the child's best interest not to have a relationship with her biological father.

> We also find it ethically acceptable for a couple not to ask who fathered their own child.

That sounds to me like an extremely toxic relationship.

> We also generally find it ethically acceptable to form and especially continue relationships based on factors other than true love, including stability of a family environment and economic stability.

Those are at least real emotions and real decisions made honestly, not elaborate and unthinkably cruel deceptions.

Imagine you learned the person you thought was your parent, or sibling, or spouse, was really another person entirely. They never loved you, they never wanted to spend time with you, and all your memories with them were a lie. They were just a hired actor the real part of your family paid $50 an hour to deceive you.

It's hard to imagine anything that could be more painful. It's far worse than a death in the family. It'd be on par with learning your loved one were a murderer or rapist. It's like a particularly unsettling Twilight Zone or Black Mirror plot—I'm aghast that it's a real thing.

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