Japanese man makes job out of hanging out with people

Tired of sitting around waiting to find your dream job? What if sitting around could BE your dream job? A man in Japan is doing just that as he charges lonely people over 2,500 baht an hour just to hang out or accompany them. Tokyo resident Shoji Morimoto is 38 years old and has created a lucrative job out of charging 10,000 yen per hour to provide companionship to those people in need.

And before you ask the obvious question: no, his services do not include anything intimate or sexual and he reserves the right to refuse any activity that he finds inappropriate or simply does not want to do.

But his job has found plenty of people who need someone to keep them company or participate in an activity that they potentially could not do alone. Shoji joined a customer for tea and cakes, with little conversation and mostly looking at their phones, simply because she wanted to wear an Indian sari to the tea and didn’t want to deal with entertaining her friends or their embarrassment or judgment over her fashion choice.

He has turned down a trip to Cambodia and a client who wanted help moving a refrigerator, but he did accompany a stranger who hired him to the train station so that when the person boarded the train he could smile and wave as the train departed to give the passenger a proper warm send-off.

If you’re thinking to yourself, “why would anybody need a second person to join them for random or even mundane activities” consider the client who hired him to play on a park seesaw. Shoji explains his unique career and how he’s become extremely useful at being useless.

“I started wondering what would happen if I provided my ability to do nothing as a service to clients. Basically, I rent myself out. My job is to be wherever my clients want me to be and to do nothing in particular. People tend to think that my doing nothing is valuable because it is useful (for others)… But it’s fine to not do anything. People do not have to be useful in any specific way.”

He had worked previously in a publishing company and he said that his coworkers mocked him for doing nothing, and in that he discovered his true calling. He now has a following of 250,000 people on Twitter which is where most of the customers come from. He says about 25% are repeat customers and one client has hired his services 270 times.

His assistance is in such demand that he was able to quit his job and support his wife and child by seeing one or two people per day, down from three or four per day before the Covid-19 pandemic. In an interview, he wouldn’t reveal exactly how much he was making, but he has been booked over 4,000 times in the past four years, so his job doing nothing seems to be paying off.

SOURCE: Asia One