It’s not often that you go to a wedding, as I did last weekend, where the best man is a professional stand-up comedian and scriptwriter, but it seems that many Japanese grooms are struggling to find anyone at all to say a few words at their nuptials. According to an article in the Guardian newspaper in the UK, the latest thing in Japan is “rent-a-friend” agencies, which hire out fake best men, relatives, colleagues, husbands, wives, boyfriends and girlfriends for social functions such as weddings, funerals and school sports days, allowing socially-isolated Japanese people to save face in front of their peers.
There are currently 10 rent-a-friend agencies in Japan, with up to 1,000 “friends” for hire on their books. For a modest sum, the rent-a-friend will familiarise themselves with any questions that may come up about the clients’ life (mobile phone number, birthday, job history, what their kids are up to etc...) and accompany the client to whatever the event is. Extra activities such as giving a wedding speech or singing karaoke are charged at a premium.
The Guardian says that the rise of the phony friend is:
“...a symptom of social and economic changes, combined with a deep-seated cultural aversion to giving personal and professional problems a public airing.
In recent months demand has surged for bogus bosses among men who have lost their jobs; for colleagues among contract employees who never stay in the same job long enough to make friends, and from divorcees and lovelorn singletons.”
I’m not sure how I feel about this phenomenon. At first I was vaguely amused in that eye-rolling “only in Japan” kind of way, then I thought, how tragic to have so few social resources that you have to resort to paying someone to pretend to be your friend, and finally it occurred to me that actually, it might be quite handy, under certain circumstances... Who hasn’t wished for a super-attractive piece of eye-candy to hang off one’s arm on those occasions when you’re bound to bump into an ex?
In the end, I think my stance is somewhere in between all three viewpoints: I can see the attraction and usefulness of such a service but I’m very glad I don’t have to use it.
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RentAFriend.com is a great site for this in the US. I've been looking for a service like this and they are the only site I've found in the US and they are great and not too expensive.
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