I.e. pay a lot of money in advance, it's invested and the actor gets paid from the interest. You undergo memory treatment, and now your mother who you see once a week is real as far as you know, but really she's an actor you hired years back because your actual mother died.

Sounds like a sort of reverse Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind; things could get really awkward and confusing when you end up having partial memories.

But also, possibly a brilliant way to fund nursing homes/increase visitation.

And it's like the opposite of Darth Vader. "Luke, I'm not you true father, I'm a member of the Family Romance corporation."

All memories are partial.

That's a pretty bad deal for both to be honest the client gets a fake they may even fool themselves is real (as they did) and he basically goes through all the bad parts of a relationships without being able to complain.

I kind of agree with faking it to keep up appearances like fake weddings for a lesbian daughter or a fake father so the school doesn't complain about something that is none of their business to begin with since Japanese society is the way it is but long term fake boyfriends and the like can't be healthy.

Well maybe some people are ok leading a fake life but personally if I have a void in my life that motivates me to fill it instead of patching it with a temporary stop gap.

It's the same reason I fix the cause of bugs in software not patch the symptoms they create. If I didn't do that I wouldn't be much of software developer.

Isn't that why the service provider gets paid? I believe the service provider knows that this is the deal.

At the end of the day it's bad for both parties even if they don't realise it I mean he did say he doesn't want a family because of all the shit he puts up faking it although he framed it more politely.

Because of his work he thinks that all families are like the ones he pretends to be a part of but is that really true?

You choose your partner but not your customer so it's not the same and a important distinction.

In season 1 of the modern adaption of Westworld it's the robot actors that don't know they are not real. The customers know it's not real.

If anything else happens in the books or the movies or other series I don't want to know.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldboy_(2003_film) , I haven't seen the 2013 remake

But it's not really that surprising, as much as I love Japan, the way they've commoditized casual social interactions has always been downright scary to me.

Hostess club culture might be the most obvious example, but it's only the most well known atop a whole mountain of service industry which revolves around people paying for casual social interactions, which imho belong among basic human needs.

The notoriously strict Japanese social hierarchy probably played a part in the widespread establishment of such practices: Can't show any weakness among social peers, so people rather isolate themselves and even keep their casual social interactions on a "professional level". This also removes the need to keep up with peer pressure in a very dense and very socially competitive environment, just outsource all the venting to a service worker.

I fear in a not so far-flung future this will become more common outside of Japan because high population density probably also played a role in the establishment of these strict social hierarchies and all their resulting woes.

The tragic thing being that we are all just lonely broken people but nobody likes to admit it, so we just keep on playing games of pretend with each other.

It's very hard for me to condemn this when the outcome seems so inarguably positive. Truthfulness is important, yes, but so is outcome. And if this woman after ten or twenty years, when she is well-adjusted with a career and family of her own, finds out the truth, would she be angry with her mother - or thank her?

Ethics is not black and white. It can often be a struggle between multiple competing imperatives. This is a Trolley Problem for the human soul.

O righteous crusaders for truth, if this girl was put in front of you, would you tell her?

How does the daughter feel about having a father she sees so infrequently? Is it hard on her? Does she wonder why he won't come help her when she calls him out of the blue over some emergency? Now that she's older, would it be easier for her to know the truth?

We don't know. What I do know is eventually she'll find out, somehow. What happens then?

Bullying also has its own share of research (https://www.nichd.nih.gov/health/topics/bullying/conditionin...). It will not be easy to get a fair evaluation of harm vs harm mitigation.

So the real question is: is the 4-hours a week of fake fatherhood better than being a bullied, emotionally traumatized kid throughout some of the hardest moments of growing up?

Its a fake, rent-a-father for 4 hours a week. But that fake fatherhood is probably way better than no fatherhood at all.

Its a difficult moral question for sure.

Maybe yes. Along with the fact that her fake father dreams about telling her the truth, but is afraid to do so. So then they can maybe have a real relationship and see each other whenever they want to and not only when her mother pays him to be professional.

Because clearly both have a real connection.

Btw. is he not scared of openl publishing all this? Or does no one in japan reads english magazines?

What makes you think that wouldn't have happened over time by itself? What's the message here, bullying someone for having lost her father is okay, not having a father is not okay? That's normalizing people being bullied for being humans. It's normalizing not allowing a widow to find another lover who at least may have an actual "bigger brother" style connection to her children than some actor who has none.

We don't need "figures" and "role models" for what they seem like, like pixels on a screen. That need comes from being someone, at least the natural initial desire to become someone, and it aims at people who are someone, too.

> Ethics is not black and white.

Except of course for the father figure she "obviously" needs, and how the confidence has "improved" (implied: from not good enough to good enough), during that "critical" part of the development as if there were any non-critical ones in life.

> O righteous crusaders for truth, if this girl was put in front of you, would you tell her?

That's not the question. The question is, would you fake being her father, or would you hire a fake father, and the answer to both of that for me is no, I can bet you my life on that, in writing. Oh righteous crusader for deep considerations, can you at least not turn faking being a father into the burden of "telling the truth" in a situation we would not have incurred in the first place?

When something makes you sad, there is usually good reason for it. Why not simply give her drugs to make her happy, and money to make it not matter if she has a career? If truthfulness, who you actually are, is just this thing on the side trumped by "outcome", why arbitrarily stop there? Why not permanently install on VR helmets and drug pumps onto everybody right after birth, done?

What would people who don't mind something like this have to withstand something even more twisted? How about this is already 20 iterations past sane, how about no? How about having a decent society instead of a rising tide of shut-ins and suicide and elderly people with plastic robot dogs? If you can't see those elephants on the couch, how can you be all life coach about this maybe not being the sad, nutty thing it is on the surface because it's possible that in 20 years it might have turned out well? Start everything like you want it to end. If you can't handle even someone else's mortality, how about your own? When I worked in a hospital, I was constantly amazed at the idle chit chat relatives made with people who had very short time left. I felt like those of the stuff who made human connections were the only ones remotely realizing what was going on. The visitors just dipped in, coated in a shell of activity, and left before anything could sink in. And I believe many genuinely loved those they visited, for some they were the apple of their eye; they were just so inept at life that they wasted those last moments together, too. In short, just to repeat, no. No to all of it. No to that entire branch.

edit: while I don't like to add even more to such a long rant (please don't take it personal in the accusative sense because I mirrored your "oh.." phrasing, take it as personal as meaning a lot to me), another thought occurred to me that actually does make me a bit angry: he's not "giving" her a fake father, he's taking her real and unfortunately dead father away from her. In the sense of role models and emotional support a LOT of things and people can do -- in the sense of the person you are and who your parents are, there are no substitutes. This is unforgivable to me; not that it's my call in this case, but if I was that girl, and I found out one day, that guy would have to fear for his life. How is it even possible that it's legal for him to not own up when she turns 18? Just because the lie started when she wasn't an adult? There is not one single aspect of this that isn't utterly fucked up to me. No, it's not understandable. It's understandable as in you needed to clean the dishes and now there is a 100 m tall sea monster destroying the whole block.

Having acted as the perfect boyfriend, husband, and father, in bite-sized chunks, even while exhausted, subject of the article is in an ideal position to take on the real thing. The only difference is that the actors get to stop playing their roles when the scene is over, while the real people have to keep their masks on forever.

As screwed up as it may sound, this guy is actually removing one of the layers of mutually-reinforced illusion from Japanese society, by openly admitting that the other person in an interaction is playing a predefined role in exchange for valuable consideration. It's like that old cynical description of an older profession: you're not paying for that, you're paying for them to leave afterward. You're substituting cash for the emotional investment you would otherwise have to put in as your half of the exchange. It's brutally mercenary, but some people are happy enough with the illusion. Why else would novels and teleplays be so popular? If my entire life is a lie anyway, why not pay a little extra to make it a good one?

This article is one of the reasons why I think Japan will be the first to industrialize companionship AI, and thereby blow huge, gaping, unrepairable holes through their own culture within the span of a single generation. Some forward-thinking researcher had better install a secret matchmaking protocol into the model before version one ships, or we're all doomed.

Everyone wants this. An end to bullying would be great. Social expectations, roles, and conformity is harmful when it leads to groups ganging up on individuals.

And it doesn't end in school. I have personally had job interview in which the lack of popular social activity outside schools hours resulted in me not getting the job. Every time I see a studying looking at appearance and conformity to social expectations and norms I see a global phenomenon where society rewards conformity and punish non-conformity. Faking conformity is not a solution, but I can't say there has been much progress in removing the underlying issue. From my view there was progress until about mid 1970, in which the trend reversed and now we have a polarized world in which you either must conform to a naturalist or purist view (The Chromium Fence).

> When I worked in a hospital, I was constantly amazed at the idle chit chat relatives made with people who had very short time left.

Measure the stress levels and I think you would get a interesting correlation. There were a study done on parents to cancer sick children, and there were some direct correlation between behavior and stress management. In short summery to what I recall, suppressing the idea that the child was sick gave short-term stress reduction but that had a major price to pay when reality crashed in. Those that accepted reality early and gave themselves some room to exercise control (like making sure someone was in the room, that the nurses read the right bed-night story, and so on) generally faired better in the long run. It is not a fun study, but it is a good explanation for human behavior.

Society has never been perfect, and it's a very tall order to say that an individual had the agency to build one where this situation would not have incurred in the first place. A single man cannot undo decades of societal decay.

In this situation, you have the agency of one person, to (try) improve the life of another's. If you were the widow, how long do you think you would have to search and deal with various male figures before you finally found the right guy? If you were Yuichi, do you take up this case and try to live honestly with the daughter forever and abandon your old life? Or you can, as you seem to be arguing, do nothing and hopefully the daughter deals with bullying. Those are your options. It isn't fair to the daughter to say "these people who tried to help you are wrong, what they should have done is solve Japan's suicide problem."

Rosa Parks didn't put the powder in the keg, and she didn't want to light no fuse. She was just sick and tired of something she considered wrong and demeaning for herself.

So yes, if it helps, I would probably want to tell that girl. It's dumb to "give an answer" to such a hypothetical. If you were Trump's old school buddy, would you still go jogging with him? Anyway, you know how they say to ignore bullies, and hiring a fake father is going so far in the opposite direction (apart from the totally fucked up priorities in the first place IMO, your actual identity > discomfort that prompts you to grow). And it's not "unfair" to expect people to not make things worse.

Last week, for the first time in my life, someone I care about died. There was lots of "idle chit-chat" as we sat around him (in a coma) in the hospital for 2 weeks, waiting for the end. IMO the content of our conversation didn't really count for much, it was being there for each other that mattered. Words are not the only way you can express deep emotions

Japan may be full of single men, and I'm sure many are wonderful people, but she already failed once in her judgment, so how can she trust herself not do to it again? Is it laziness to avoid swimming after you've almost drowned before?

Plus, you're actually reinforcing her position, by treating "a father" as something you just go out and get, like a car. What if she simply doesn't want to be intimate with anyone? How many single men are prepared to be a father without being a husband?

What you're essentially saying is that you agree that she should hire a father for her daughter, only that she should pay with her body instead of her money.

I think that's harsh and short sighted. Why is marrying a single man better for her daughter? How is that more "real"? It's certainly not true in all cases. If her mother remarried to an abusive alcoholic do you seriously think that's better than hiring what's essentially a professional father?

In every social interaction we can never really be certain of the other person's motivations or feelings about us, or even if they really have feelings as opposed to being an automaton or a hallucination. In many cases it doesn't really matter that much. When a waiter smiles and laughs with us, they might just be thinking about their tip and how much their shoes hurt, but we can still enjoy their company.

Parenthood, romantic love, close friendship are not like this. They rely on a deep level of trust. If you pretended to be my lover, it wouldn't be enough to say "well you couldn't tell and you enjoyed it". There is an implicit shared emotional connection.

In particular, children need to be able to trust their parents.

Children who have been adopted are also "tricked" but I don't think all of them prefer their birth families.

The comment above is implying that the woman is "a lazy, dishonest bitch" for not going and finding a boyfriend or husband so that the girl won't be bullied at school, which is a pretty clueless thing to say. The idea that a family needs a father in order to have any worth or be treated with any respect is the cause of the problem in the first place, and this comment is just reinforcing that ignorant and incorrect position.

In other words, the reason the woman needs to hire someone in the first place to keep her daughter safe is because of people like the person who posted that comment.

There's a well documented reason why there are a lot of single men in Japan.

What is that reason? (Serious question)

The reasons behind _that_ aren't so well understood but generally seem to be disillusionment with the idea of falling in love, getting married and having a family, unwillingness to fit in with traditional expectations (housewife taking care of the kids + hard working salaryman husband) or simply seeing relationships as too hard.

We also generally find it ethically acceptable to form and especially continue relationships based on factors other than true love, including stability of a family environment and economic stability.

What, really, is different about this? Just the fact that we're not lying to ourselves about what the relationship is?

I would strongly favor honesty in both those situations once the child is mature enough to understand, except, in the latter case, when it's clearly in the child's best interest not to have a relationship with her biological father.

> We also find it ethically acceptable for a couple not to ask who fathered their own child.

That sounds to me like an extremely toxic relationship.

> We also generally find it ethically acceptable to form and especially continue relationships based on factors other than true love, including stability of a family environment and economic stability.

Those are at least real emotions and real decisions made honestly, not elaborate and unthinkably cruel deceptions.

Imagine you learned the person you thought was your parent, or sibling, or spouse, was really another person entirely. They never loved you, they never wanted to spend time with you, and all your memories with them were a lie. They were just a hired actor the real part of your family paid $50 an hour to deceive you.

It's hard to imagine anything that could be more painful. It's far worse than a death in the family. It'd be on par with learning your loved one were a murderer or rapist. It's like a particularly unsettling Twilight Zone or Black Mirror plot—I'm aghast that it's a real thing.

"We also generally find it ethically acceptable to form and especially continue relationships based on factors other than true love, including stability of a family environment and economic stability" In this case, both of the people involved are grown adults and usually know reasonably well what's going on.

The real problem here is how deep a break of trust this would be if they ever found out, and how wrong of an idea this would give ppl of relationships.

Wait, we do? Social issues aside, what about family medical history!?

There's father-by-birth, and then father-by-adoption, and then father-by-convention.

The daughter thinks the rental is her real father. That's highly likely to unravel sometime in her life time. Certainly at his funeral...he is using a fake name and personna.

Not that someone has to be blamed, but it’s the shitty start of the story.

From there if the mother can fake it until her daughter is in a better situation, I think it’s positive.

Even if it doesn’t turn out that well, I am not sure it would much more devastating than having been bullied for all that time she was decieved, and it could a start for a discussion on how she deals with her father image.

The real father actually did disappear, after a history of abuse.

Smart children know. Very smart children hide it from you, so the loot keeps coming. Children that are too smart for their own good denounce all the cargo-culting rituals, introduce a cleaner, less obfuscated, and more efficient process, and end up getting socks, underwear, and mechanical pencils.

But obviously some kids never figure out the tricks, even long after they are grown. I am thankful that if I did have a kid that thick, I could hire a Japanese man at $50/hour for the express purpose of spoiling it for them and telling them to grow up, even as I insisted that yes, kid, there really is a Santa Claus. I guess you never know for sure that they are on board with the program until you're a grandparent.