
Middle-aged men for rent in Japan - johnny313
https://edition.cnn.com/2018/08/02/health/ossan-renting-middle-aged-men-in-japan-intl/index.html
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wufufufu
These kinds of "look how weird Japan is!" articles are an unintentional
personal attack on an entire country. And the articles always come up more
frequently in the software engineering / computer science social scene.

> Though it started slow, his website has roughly 45 ossan rentals a day now,
> or 10,000 encounters per year

Really? That's it? There are no statistics on the rate of occurrence of this
per population, yet this researcher has taken it upon them to tell the whole
world that middle-aged men are for rent in Japan.

Someone should research why Americans have an infatuation with a few cultural
aspects of Japanese culture. And it's always things like "young people don't
want to date!" or "you can buy hentai at vending machines". Anecdotally, some
Americans fetishize these aspects of Japanese culture, and I think that skews
everyone's perceptions of the country. I think some fraction of Americans want
so bad for Japan to be as weird as the anime they watch.

Everyone I've met from Japan seems completely normal in relation to these
articles.

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wvenable
Don't worry the rest of the world has a similar infatuation with American
culture, with the same biases, and the same "everyone I've met from America
has been normal" phenomenon.

~~~
wufufufu
Please, let me continue to fantasize about morbidly obese gun-toting Americans

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vfc1
80% of the users are women, and according to the researcher:

..."All of this indicates to me that this is likely a casual dating site
without saying so," she said, adding that "sex and romance" could be an
"expectation on all sides involved."

Looks like the creator of the site wrote a dating column, so a sort of
undercover hiding in plain sight dating website, that could be a simple
explanation.

~~~
bittercynic
Maybe I'm being naive, but it seems reasonable to think that many people are
using this service for purposes that don't include romance or sex.

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mikekchar
I'm middle aged and in Japan. If you want to come and buy me beer, I'll
happily chat with you for hours on end :-)

~~~
IIAOPSW
Friggen ageism. You know how hard it is for me as a young man in Japan to be a
middle age man for rent?

For real though, given the use-case of the clients, foreigners would be
perfect for this job. You can throw anything on them and not worry because
they will skip the country soon. Only problem is the language barrier.

As someone that is very much here today, gone tomorrow, people have been
exceptionally open with me. Maybe I _should_ start renting myself out.

~~~
your-nanny
I have heard that in Japan a "foreigner" might live in Japan for forty years,
be fluent in language, culture, and custom, and yet still called a foreigner
and not Japanese; I have heard likewise that that is not the case in Taiwan,
ie to be Chinese is to act Chinese. What do you think?

~~~
IIAOPSW
I think the only country where you can truly become not-a-foreigner are the
young countries (US, Canada etc) because we simply haven't been around long
enough to define our national identity on ancestry. Every other country does
define itself on ancestry (some more nationalistic than others).

Don't get me wrong, your presence can become very much accepted and even
appreciated, but you're always wai guo ren / gai jin. I'm struggling to think
of a solid example right now.

I haven't lived in Taiwan. Do they call us laowai in Taiwan or is that just a
mainland thing?

~~~
qkls
You can become a not-a-foreigner in many European countries if you are white
and speak without an accent.

On the flipside, you can be classified as a foreigner even if you'd live your
whole life in the country but aren't white.

~~~
HelloNurse
It depends, many European countries are ethnically diverse enough that
appropriately dressed people of many ethnicities can look like natives; on the
other hand many immigrants, including very ethnically aligned ones, look like
immigrants even after one or two generations.

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holstvoogd
I find it funny how they basically value the marginally informed opinion of a
researcher in the USA over the word of someone actually involved in the story
へ‿(ツ)‿ㄏ

~~~
andrewl
Sabine Fruhstuck, the professor interviewed, appears to be more than
marginally informed:

[http://www.eastasian.ucsb.edu/people/faculty/sabine-
fruhstuc...](http://www.eastasian.ucsb.edu/people/faculty/sabine-fruhstuck/)

Her specialty area is listed as Modern Japanese Cultural Studies. She's
researched and written on sexuality in Japan, Japanese military culture,
Japanese leisure culture, men's issues, and more. I think a foreign researcher
who had spent a career immersed in my culture (I live in the United States)
could well have more insight into how pieces of it fit together than I would.

~~~
fenomas
I imagine GP may have meant "marginally informed" about the company
specifically - the article makes it sound like her judgment of it is based its
website.

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low
My friend said he used this service to buy daily necessities when he was in
hospital. He also said it was pretty useful. (I and he are both Japanese.)

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pinebox
Shades of the "NEEDED: Generic Father Figure for Backyard BBQ" Craigslist ad.

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ilaksh
Makes me think I should start a website called Rent-A-Dad featuring
experienced looking model types in the home page. Aimed at lonely single
mothers.

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YCode
> Urban citizens may be desperate to get advice from an older, wiser person,
> but they don't want to turn to the guy they've worked with for years or the
> uncle who remembers the tears shed over a broken toy truck. Someone familiar
> might judge them.

Maybe it's a cultural difference, but excepting dysfunctional relationships
the idea that your close friends and family are the wrong people to give you
advice is almost dystopian.

~~~
CamTin
In the US, we have the understanding bartender or wise taxi driver stereotype.
This seems like largely the same thing: somebody with some perspective on your
situation because they aren't too bogged down with the minutiae of actually
knowing you very well who can "buck you up" or dash off an insight that your
spouse or friends can't.

~~~
S-E-P
They make you comfortable as they attempt to give insight to something they
don't understand, but it's not too personal and since they know little about
you, there's not much room for judgement.

Kind of like a one night stand, same principle (though much like a real
relationship is much more rewarding, it's also a lot more work, the parallels
here are fairly apparent)

~~~
jerf
Yeah. It's amazing how much good you can do for someone just listening to
them. It's "rubber duck debugging" in our industry, but the principle can be
applied to your general life too.

It's also amazing how much good you can do for someone by just listening to
them for a bit, and then deploying the correct platitude. No originality, no
great wisdom, just the right thing said at the right time, from someone whom
the listener doesn't have years of emotional callouses, defenses, and
preconceptions built up to prevent them from hearing the simplest of words
without hearing the echos of years past.

With a bit more effort you can do even better, of course; I'm not trying to
oversell the goodness. I'm saying the _bang for the buck_ can be surprisingly
good for people.

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Kagerjay
they have cuddle rooms as well, so this doesn't really surprise me either

