The Booming Japanese Rent-A-Friend Business

Post by pagnol » Thu, Nov 09, 2017, 7:28 PM UTC

freeflight wrote: post #174

hkmurakami wrote: post #2

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…

> Pretty close to some dystopian scifi actually. But it's not really that surprising, as much as I love Japan, the way they've commoditized casual social interactions has always been downright scary to me. Hostess club culture might be the most obvious example, but it's only the most well known atop a whole mountain of service industry which revolves around people paying for casual social interactions, which imho bel…

Post by xhrpost » Thu, Nov 09, 2017, 8:10 PM UTC

cableshaft wrote: post #100

sdrothrock wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty hard to just up and make friends in Japan. People generally stick to social/activity circles, but even then, you have boundaries. For example, if you have a golfing group, you guys may go out for drinks but that would be that. You'd almost (key word) never go over to someone else's house, or go see movies together, or any of that -- they're your "golf people." But that's assuming that you do have a golf g…

This is common in the U.S. too. I can't begin to tell you how many threads I've encountered where people go "How do you make friends after college?" or studies that show that people lose friends over time and hardly gain any after college, on average. But, I don't think it has to be that way in the US. I myself went from having few friends to having more than I can keep up with, thanks to a period of two years where…

Post by jf » Thu, Nov 09, 2017, 8:21 PM UTC

fnwx17 wrote: post #97

top notch journalism, I couldn't stop until I read the entire article, not skipping any paragraph. the whole thing is just an interview/dialogue, but it's incredibly captivating also, you could make three separate movies on existentialism just with ideas from the article. lastly - the interviewee, he must have such strong philosophical dilemmas

Post by Veratyr » Thu, Nov 09, 2017, 8:26 PM UTC

echion wrote: post #173

_aldr wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, it's the "Her mother is a lazy, dishonest bitch who bought a fake father rather than finding a real one for her daughter." part of the comment. It's very strong language that I don't think is deserved and it makes it sound like finding a new father would be easy. There's a well documented reason why there are a lot of single men in Japan.

> There's a well documented reason why there are a lot of single men in Japan. What is that reason? (Serious question)

Post by hood_syntax » Thu, Nov 09, 2017, 8:28 PM UTC

edgarvaldes wrote: post #171

eighthnate wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost everything the media writes about japan is exaggerated clickbait. This is true of all "exotic" cultures ( china, india, middle east, africa, mexico, etc ) but for some reason, it's especially true of japan. It's a form of cultural/racial fetishism. Other countries do that with us too. Foreigners think that all americans carry guns, wave flags and settle disputes with a duel. The media latches on to a fringe su…

Are we (Mexico) exotic for the USA? Honest question.