Sometimes, lonely people miss the warmth of spending time together with the ones they love, either friends or a family. In Japan, there is a rental family service who enables them to buy the illusion of it.
Meet Ishii Yuichi, the founder of Family Romance who provides the service of rental family in Japan. This 37-year-old man has envisioned a way to bring the service into reality as The New Yorker reported.
Together with more than 12.000 actors and actresses he employs, the service deals with numerous cases such as daily family routines up to wedding parties. With a fee starting from JPY 8.000, the customers can specify their request based on appearance, behavior, and so forth.
For instance, one of the customers, Kazushige Nishida, ordered the company’s service. Accordingly, he rent a wife and daughter after his real wife died and his daughter left him.
Through numerous meetings, Nishida stated that he genuinely felt emotionally better for experiencing the environment he once had. Furthermore, he described the experience more fulfilling compared to going to a hostess club.
Besides that, Nishida was also open to the ‘wife’ and ‘daughter.’ He gave advice to the wife on her own marital problems and the daughter advised him to contact his real daughter, in which he truly did.
Accordingly, this is one of the objectives Yuichi intends to tackle. However, pertaining to the services, reality does not always project the same beauty as sometimes it leads to different outcomes.
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The Services
The service Yuichi brings is not the one and only service existing in Japan. There are also various identical services to the one provided by Romance Family.
Another rental service named New Start aims to help hikikomori-those who lock themselves up in their rooms. The service helps those people by employing rental sisters.
Also, there is Ossan Rental that offers rental uncles. In addition these uncles will help young women who need guidance with life and love problems and become drinking partners at bars as well.
These services provide emotional assistance for those who truly need it. To put the context in Japan, sometimes society will not truly care about ones’ feelings. That is why these kinds of services are required, according to the customers.
“We Japanese have strong character. But we aren’t good at dealing with emotion. Japan is not an ideal place for the care of the mind. We want to enrich the lives of our customers by attending to their emotional needs, and help them move forward,” said Ishii Yuichi, founder of Romance Family.
