Why suffer a flawed family when you can hire a better one?

April 24, 2018 2:02 PM

Japanese rental roles aren't new, but this New Yorker piece is the best take I've read on them.
posted by ecourbanist (19 comments total)

Fascinating article. Thanks for posting!
posted by insectosaurus at 2:48 PM on April 24, 2018 [2 favorites]

Agreed that this is a great article -- almost unconvincingly so. There are too many interesting stories of how these rental roles intersect with particular individuals: in particular, the story of Reiko and Inaba brought tears to my eyes (I won't say more lest I ruin it for others.)

But Family Romance appears to be a completely real business, and Ishii himself was the subject of another, less interesting profile in the Atlantic late last year (the inspiration for this piece?). So this story is not itself inauthentic, or no more so than the people it profiles.
posted by crazy with stars at 2:50 PM on April 24, 2018 [1 favorite]

That was beautiful. Both touching, when she describes the cases where the rented relatives are basically therapy, and hilarious in places, like bringing “your boss” with you to personally apologize to a disgruntled customer, but your real boss doesn’t know you messed up.
posted by w0mbat at 3:06 PM on April 24, 2018 [3 favorites]

I admit it: I miss the trappings of having family more than I miss my real family. If something like this were available where I was, I would totally rent one or both parents for my birthday or something. Even if they were flawed people who weren't somehow pretending to be my real parents or their perfect alternatives. I can see how it'd be easy to overcommit, but I can also see how it'd be nice to just be like "okay I'm going to line up dinner with my fake mom this weekend" but not have to slot her and her opinions into every other aspect of my life forever. (We are estranged for a reason.)

I'd like to say it'd be better to do some kind of matchmaking between, like, older people who'd like kids and younger people who'd like parents, say, but even aside from issues of personal safety, I can picture so many worse things happening with that than with paid actors.
posted by Sequence at 3:08 PM on April 24, 2018 [2 favorites]

Another rental agency offers a more specialized service: its name, Ikemeso Takkyūbin, means “handsome men weeping delivery.” Clients choose from a menu of handsome men corresponding to different types, including “little brother,” “tough guy,” “intellectual,” “swordsman,” “mixed race,” and, puzzlingly, “dentist.”

In other news, the article's author has apparently never been to the dentist.
posted by The Bellman at 3:37 PM on April 24, 2018 [1 favorite]

"In other news, the article's author has apparently never been to the dentist."

I have been many times before and I don't have generalization for that type of person.
posted by GoblinHoney at 4:01 PM on April 24, 2018

In a sense, the idea of a rental partner, parent, or child is perhaps less strange than the idea that childcare and housework should be seen as the manifestations of an unpurchasable romantic love.

Huh.
posted by Metasyntactic at 4:19 PM on April 24, 2018 [4 favorites]

I tend to think with these sorts of articles that "Japan" should be substituted with "Tokyo", since this is not really part of Japanese culture. And Tokyo is in some ways a different country than the rest of Japan in terms of its affluence and urban way of life.

To put it another way, if you put thirty million (or more) people together, and if many of those people are affluent and highly educated, you're going to get some interesting things happening, like "rent-a-friend" or whatever. Like professional cuddlers in the US.

Batuman is a capable reporter and writer, but she doesn't have a background in Japan, and even people from "Tokyo" (which is a multiplicity unto itself) have a hard time imagining life outside of the city in other parts of Japan.
posted by JamesBay at 4:25 PM on April 24, 2018 [5 favorites]

This is a really interesting piece; thank you for posting it.
posted by LobsterMitten at 4:29 PM on April 24, 2018

It seems like a pretty solid way to provide compensation for emotional labor. Hire a wife instead of expecting your next girlfriend to solve all your problems. I mean it’s not a utopian solution, but its something.
posted by Grandysaur at 4:53 PM on April 24, 2018 [2 favorites]

This was great, the second half really lifted it above the Atlantic article with the same topic that was published a while ago. Lots of interesting nuggets and reflection - also, I really liked how it immediately shied away from exoticising everything and going for a "wacky Japan" angle, instead explicating the social and demographic factors that led to this, and pointing out western analogues as well.

I thought this was one very illuminating little gem about Japanese culture: Authenticity and consistency aren’t necessarily valued for their own sake, and the concealment of authentic honne behind conventional tatemae is often construed as an act of unselfishness and sociability, rather than of deception or hypocrisy.

A simple explanation that I think highlights how Japanese culture - and in some respects other Asian cultures with confucian influences - emphasises the communal over the individual.
posted by smoke at 5:01 PM on April 24, 2018 [5 favorites]

It seems like a pretty solid way to provide compensation for emotional labor. Hire a wife instead of expecting your next girlfriend to solve all your problems.

Ah, I would be cautious about thinking this way: from what I have observed Japanese domestic relationships do not map to Western relationships in a 1:1 kind of way. In many ways, Japanese society is horrifically, jaw-droppingly sexist - the roles that girlfriends and wives are expected to "play" are can be very different and very confining - this sexism in some ways I think drives the behaviour of 'outsourcing' (eg, my actual wife's fatness is causing problems at parent/teacher interviews and elsewhere, as noted in the article). It's not necessary about outsourcing emotional labour, and I would probably say ideas of what constitutes emotional labour in Japan can be quite different to the west.

Of course, at the same time, I don't think it necessarily pays to file these heteronormative relationships and their culture under "hopelessly sexist, much worse than Us". Men can be subject to other stultifying expectations and roles; in some respects avenues for self-expression are more limited. Roles themselves also have their own areas of responsibility, etc. The article touches on this when she talks about the development of current Japanese ideas of "Family". It's very interesting stuff.
posted by smoke at 5:10 PM on April 24, 2018 [4 favorites]

Like anywhere else, Japan is all about roles. Unlike, say, the US, in Japan roles are explicitly defined. Women are expected to be homemakers and caregivers (men are expected to earn money). It's their job, according to explicitly understood cultural norms.

I'm basing this off of being married to a Gen Xer, so things may have changed over the past twenty years.

The real problem Japanese women are running into now is that Womenomics expects them to re-enter the workforce and hold down careers, whereas in the past a certain class of women would have stayed home to manage the household (because wages are low, in blue collar households many women hold part-time jobs in supermarkets and so on).

So now women are explicitly expected to a) run the household b) take caring of aging parents c) work long hours.

How the hell can they do all that? is the question.

There are no new explicitly defined societal roles for men, on the other hand, to help even the load. But I am optimistic that Japan will change more rapidly and more meaningfully than Canada. There is a great grassroots desire to improve the status of women.
posted by JamesBay at 6:15 PM on April 24, 2018 [1 favorite]

I (a USian) enjoyed this article.

I had previously read about the rental-family phenomenon, but it had been problematically framed as look-at-this-weirdness. In contrast, this article attempted to put it in historical and cultural context, inviting empathy and a fresh look at how human needs are met. Rather than thinking I have learned something about Japanese (or Tokyo) culture, my basic assumptions about the phenomenon of western-style families have been gently challenged.
posted by Metasyntactic at 1:30 AM on April 25, 2018 [1 favorite]

Fantastic article, yes:

In a sense, the idea of a rental partner, parent, or child is perhaps less strange than the idea that childcare and housework should be seen as the manifestations of an unpurchasable romantic love. Patriarchal capitalism has arguably had a vested interest in promoting the latter idea as a human universal: as the Marxist psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich pointed out, with women providing free housework and caregiving, capitalists could pay men less. There were other iniquities, too. As Gilman observed, when caregiving becomes the exclusive, unpaid purview of wives and mothers, then people without families don’t have access to it: “only married people and their immediate relatives have any right to live in comfort and health.” Her solution was that the unpaid work incumbent on every individual housewife—nursery education, household-work management, food preparation, and so on—should be distributed among paid specialists, of both genders. What often happens instead is that these tasks, rather than becoming respected, well-paid professions, are foisted piecemeal onto socioeconomically disadvantaged women, freeing their more privileged peers to pursue careers.

posted by fraula at 1:52 AM on April 25, 2018 [4 favorites]

Weddings are the bread and butter of the rental-relative business, perhaps because traditions that dictate the number of guests haven’t changed to reflect increasing urbanization and migration, shrinking families, and decreased job security. Laid-off grooms rent replacements for co-workers and supervisors. People who changed schools a lot rent childhood friends. The newly affianced, reluctant to trouble one another with family problems, may rent substitutes for parents who are divorced, incarcerated, or mentally ill. One Hagemashi-tai client simply didn’t want to tell his fiancée that his parents were dead, so he rented replacements.

Up to now, twice-married me has been pretty sure I never want to have a "wedding" again. But I am inspired by this paragraph and would now like to throw a fake wedding with completely fake friends, relatives, and groom.
posted by JanetLand at 6:00 AM on April 25, 2018 [3 favorites]

Really interesting article, thanks.
posted by paduasoy at 10:27 AM on April 25, 2018

Here's the discussion of the Atlantic piece, previously.
posted by Margalo Epps at 5:55 PM on May 10, 2018

I found this article really compelling, and interesting to think about in relation to this idea common in my queer radical circles of chosen family - who sometimes fill in the sort of roles that you hoped your blood family would do only to be disappointed. There were times where I had told the mother of my then-boyfriend (the three of us spent time regularly) "hey, my mum's being annoying, can you be my mum for the day". I have a good friend now whose nickname literally IS Mama because she's very mother-hen to her own gaggle of queer/poc/marginalised artist types despite only being 27 (apparently she's been like this since she was a kid; the Mama nickname was given to her when she was a pre-teen).

And even outside the queer context - I grew up with a lot of Aunties and Uncles who weren't genetically related to me but were in my life and sometimes took on surrogate parent roles when my parents weren't able to, such as taking care of me & housing me while my mum looked after my dad at the hospital while undergoing cancer treatment. Hell, the Mama friend I mentioned earlier feels more like one of those Aunties for me.

I can totally relate to the feeling of just wanting to pay someone to care for you without needing to care about their feelings for once. It's guilt-making - oh god, am I just like those people that don't care about emotional labour or resent having to do any?! But at the same time, I feel like I put in a lot of emotional labour with very little reciprocation - I deeply appreciate the people that DO reciprocate and do my best to make those relationships equitable, but at the same time it would be useful to be able to have people to offload some of that too without exhausting them. I was joking with one of those reciprocal friends the other day (after treating him to tea) about pillow princesses, and had this weird epiphany that my pillow-princess nature and my deepest wish for someone to throw me a surprise party came from the same place: I want people to do nice things for me without needing to have to plan and organise it first and be exhausted by that.

And I wonder if that's where some of those clients are coming from. They just want someone to be nice to them, care about them, while doing minimal planning. Let those people decide how to do things. No need to constantly nag them or subtly hint or whatever. Put what you need upfront and they take it from there. And you don't have to worry so much about their own internal struggle - you get to focus on yours for once.
posted by divabat at 8:43 PM on May 12, 2018