Japanese 'rent men' who are paid just to listen

We'll have a huge number of childless old people in a couple of decades. I am hoping for huge number of young immigrants who will be recruited to provide emotional companionship.

There are also services like http://rentafriend.com/

You can add bartenders to that list. But yeah, our society is generally pretty terrible at listening to others. We're very selfish and self-centred, often the only people who listen are those who are paid to.

Oh, should add, not sure if anyone is religious or not but priests and monks are generally good listeners, and free. Sometimes short on life experience though.

I know someone who is an Apple Tech certified consultant (don't know the exact wording but he's listed at Apple or something like that). Anyway he was telling me about some rich clients, people that pay him to come and do things as simple updating the software (you know a menu option) and it sounded to me like a version of keeping someone who is lonely and giving them a chance to talk to someone more than anything. (Not discounting some (especially older) people's fear of tech which is real, but the time he would take wasn't exactly 'get in and get out as quickly as possible'). Plus he is a super friendly nice guy (who really talks to much) so I kind of got the impression that was actually a benefit to his clients.

In some places people hire "mourners" others hire other people to add "volume" to their events. But these aren't as much psychological fillers as much as devices to save face.

> I once watched a documentary about a man managing an acting agency where people hired someone to act as a daughter, parent, etc.

Made me think of

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synecdoche,_New_York

Not a documentary, but an interesting film along similar lines: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1859446/

In America, this seems to be something only marginalized peoples do. In "Mayflower Madame," she says that some of their regular clients hired her escorts not for sex but to play their girlfriend at family events, like weddings, because they were closeted gays. In one case, the family liked his hired girlfriend so much they began encouraging them to get married, which led to them having to manufacture a dramatic breakup so this gay man would stop getting pressure to marry the call girl he had hired to play his girlfriend at family events.

Wasn't this a comedy-drama-sort of feature film where his wife doesn't know, and suspects he's having an affair because of all the secrecy surrounding his job? I could swear I saw something similar on TV a few years ago, but can't find the title of it based on the obvious keywords.

EDIT: Found the documentary: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3242460/

The Japanese place very high value on social cohesion. Deviation from the norm - especially emotional - is not accepted or acknowledged.

I can't say whether the Japanese are especially lonely. I can say that those who are have little means to express that among themselves.

If the topic interests you, check out the Hikkikomori phenomenon, such a the book: "Shutting out the Sun: How Japan created its own lost generation."

See also the difficulty that Japanese mental health professionals have in the country. Such places are as discreet as abortion clinics are in the American south.

There doesn't seem much reason to think it's more lonely on the whole, but I could believe that the lonely in Japan are more isolated than other places.

Haven't spent more than a month there however I always got the sense that it's 'harder' to be Japanese (same goes for Korean) than it is to be a Westerner.

Complex social hierarchies, deference to the boss, deference to family and elders, suppressing individualism and the overbearing pressure to conform.

Especially though, having to stop at every single pedestrian crossing even though the road is one metre wide and there's not a car or a cop for kilometres.

More than a few months of that and - bam - seppuku for me.

In response to some of the other comments I've been here for 9 years. I see zero problems with people expressing themselves. There are so many events and so many communities for doing anything you want to do.

This idea that Weetrrns have that Japanese can't express themselves because of social norms seems like complete bs to me but maybe I'm just not seeing it

I read an interesting article (sorry, don't have the linK) some time ago about a man who cleans houses after someone dies in them. The story was quite sad. He talked about the high percentage of jobs that are old people who died alone out of neglect. He said at first he could barely handle the sadness of it. But eventually he came to feel that he was doing a service to the old people by properly taking care of them and their things after their passing. The unseen part of Japan seems very sad and lonely.

Pretty much. Note the line at the beginning: "clients who would never dream of spilling their guts to a therapist or worse, their families." This is in some ways an end-run around the stigma attached to psychological treatment in Japan (and most other countries).