What it's like to rent a friend in Japan. Photo by Landon Nordeman. After lunch we roam a warren of 1. Before parting ways at the subway entrance, we ask someone to snap our photo. That funny kinship that forms in front of a camera—the arms around each other, the shared self- consciousness—seems to happen for us, too. Yumi writes her address in my notebook, draws a cartoon of herself in her fedora. It’s almost as though she really means it. Movies Fast & Furious: Tokyo Drift: Here's the story of Han. Sung Kang and Justin Lin trace the character's origin from 'Better Luck Tomorrow' to Tokyo. Open source travel guide to Tokyo, featuring up-to-date information on attractions, hotels, restaurants, nightlife, travel tips and more. Free and reliable advice written by Wikitravellers from around the globe. Two hardcore American gamers get stuck in Tokyo with no money, where they have to deal with ninjas, giant lizards, androids, the undead, schoolgirls and conscience operatives. Strip archive, story overview, character profiles. Originally Tokyo Monogatari, Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story centers on a provincial Japanese family. The elderly parents and youngest daughter journey to Tokyo to visit their doctor son and his brood. Too busy for this onslaught. During my time in Tokyo I develop a seamless routine of leaving the apartment, drifting vaguely toward the address on my phone, squinting confusedly, doubling back, eating some gyoza, and eventually stumbling onto my destination. On a drizzly Friday morning, my destination is the Client Partners headquarters, a small but airy suite in a nondescript Shibuya district office building. I rope my translator in for this, and we’re met by a round- faced woman in a long robelike garment. Maki Abe is the CEO, and for the next hour we sit across a desk from her and talk not about wacky interest- kitsch but about a nation’s spiritual health.“We look like a rich country from the outside, but mentally we have problems,” Maki says. She speaks slowly, methodically. We don’t know how to talk from the gut. We can’t ask for help. American Center Japan Our youth-oriented site keeps you up-to-date on Embassy events and more! Online Magazine Continuously updated with articles about the United States and its close ties with Japan. EducationUSA Your network. NASA.gov brings you the latest images, videos and news from America's space agency. Get the latest updates on NASA missions, watch NASA TV live, and learn about our quest to reveal the unknown and benefit all humankind. An old couple visit their children and grandchildren in the city; but the children have little time for them. So many people are alone with their problems, and stuck, and their hearts aren’t touching.”Maki and I bowed when we met, but we also shook hands. She brings it up later. We have clients who start to cry when we shake hands with them.”It’s not that people lack friends, she says. Facebook, Instagram— scroll around and you find a country bursting with mugging, partying companionship. It just isn’t real, that’s all. We have a word for the lonely gap in between that: kodoku.”Maki attributes some of this to World War II. Spiritual consciousness was widespread before that, she says. Now we’ve got selfishness instead. Not even people looking out for their own families, just themselves.”I don’t know. I’ve yet to encounter a country without a similar narrative: Things were better, now they’re worse. Maybe the CEO of a friendship rental company can’t help but see fissures in the psychic landscape, or maybe the crisis is real. Regardless, Maki wants to fix it, one synthetic relationship at a time. Before we part, she stops me. Am I aware of Client Partners’ ultimate goal? To render itself unnecessary, she says. With that, I head back out to the street, where the morning’s gentle rain has exploded into great lashing sheets. I watch for a while from under an awning, then decide to just get wet. Tokyo is too overwhelming to explore with an unfocused mind. It will break that mind. But go in with something specific to mull, and this alternately churning and serene metropolis makes a pleasantly delirious backdrop. Me, I’m pondering a phenomenon I’ve flown 5,0. Inherent absurdity and all, the rent- a- friend industry holds for me the perverse promise of elucidating something real about friendship. By dragging this sometimes nebulous kind of relationship into the realm of commerce, I reason, maybe Miyabi et al can clarify things a bit. Arguably I’m extra primed to hear the wisdom of people who are literally pros at being friends. When we were 2. 2 or so, some close friends and I formed an only- half- joking kind of men’s group. Each month we’d meet at some grimy bar and aim for a structured discussion of how we were doing. The hope was to lock in some habits of openness that seemed lacking in the older men we saw, and to not become reclusive and boring and taciturn in middle age. Looking back now, I think, we also just wanted to keep friendship front and center, to never stop with the profound and idiotic nights at the grimy bars. Nearly two decades in, I’d say we’ve avoided taciturn and reclusive, slipped a little on the boring and open front. But keeping friendship truly central? When you’re young, friendship is pure, a perfect and drunken snowflake. But as you get older, you see it can be complicated. Are my decades- old relationships truly superior to the commercial variety? But they’re also more problematic. Even with one’s dearest friends someone invariably feels slighted or underappreciated now and then. Say what you will about rent- a- friends, but they bypass that whole dynamic. You don’t wonder about such a friend’s real feelings about you because you know them—in fact, they abide by a clearly delineated rate. With the matter of intention taken off the table, you’re free to focus on just having a nice time, on connecting in that very moment. The rain lets up before I quite decide to trade my dearest amateur friends for platonic prostitutes, but I suppose I could put a few on notice. My friend Yusuke is a guy. He stands out with a big mop of hair, a goofy laugh, and old- soul eyes—but when I meet my final friend tonight, it’s his maleness that distinguishes him most in a sea of female rent- a- friends. By day, Yusuke sells furniture to corporate offices—a job, he concedes, that involves similar moves to being a friend. It’s a show.”) But artifice and all, he’s a sweet and unguarded sprite of a fellow. He lived in various countries as a student and honed that easygoing adaptability common among kids who bounce around. He expresses curiosity and opens up. We meet at the subway station in Yoyogi, and soon he’s leading me down a dark, wet street to a rickety okonomiyaki joint. Within a few minutes he’s showing me how to cook our own savory pancakes on the tabletop stove between us. Photo by Landon Nordeman. Like many Japanese people, he works 1. Tonight, I gather, is a welcome break from that routine. We talk about childhood and relationships and aging. Because our temperaments align, or because I’m comfy in Tokyo by now, or because we’re both guys, conversation is easy. At one point the waiter offers us drinks. Yusuke says no alcohol on duty, and I realize I’d forgotten this was duty at all. I’ve paid for every word Yusuke has uttered, but I’m also certain we’ve forged something genuine. I have never hired a prostitute. Maybe it’s easier to believe their professed affections than I’d imagined, even as the money is right there in front of you. Maybe life is complicated. Maybe affection can be paid for and real at the same time. Toward the end of our meal, Yusuke and I find ourselves discussing our grandfathers. It was meant to be a conversation about how social life evolves with age, but it becomes one about World War II. Both men had served, ostensibly, I suppose, trying to kill one another somewhere in the South Pacific. Each, we agree, had been deeply affected by those years. The sins of our respective countries could have plunged the meal into awkwardness, but in fact the opposite happened. In clumsily assuring each other of our good intentions—thoughtful questions! In the weeks ahead it will occur to me I’m grateful for all the elements—the smell of the pancakes, the talk of grandfathers, the wet pavement outside. Years from now, those things might just remind me of another wacky cultural phenomenon that took hold in Japan. Or they might summon the memory of this nice furniture salesman named Yusuke, a mop- headed guy who, for a couple hours one night in Tokyo, started to become a friend.> > Next: Japanese Snowsurfing is the New Snowboarding.
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January 2017
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