> “She was acting as a rental daughter, but at the same time she was telling me how she felt as a real daughter,” he said. “And yet, if it was a real father-daughter relationship, maybe she wouldn’t have spoken this honestly.” ... Yūichi Ishii, the founder of Family Romance, told me that he and his “cast” actively strategize in order to engineer outcomes like Nishida’s, in which the rental family makes itself redundant in the client’s life.

> I thought about my missed shrink appointment, and about a psychology professor I met, Kenji Kameguchi, who has been trying for the past thirty years to popularize family therapy in conflict-averse, stoical Japan, where psychotherapy is still stigmatized. He said that he thought rental relatives were, in an unschooled way, fulfilling some of the functions of group-therapy techniques such as psychodrama, in which patients act out and improvise one another’s past situations or mental processes.

From this reading, it seems to me that Japan's fake relatives are the equivalent of counselors and psychiatrists in other countries.