Renting a Friend in Tokyo
afar.com
afar.com
In my experience, money calls into question the sincerity and authenticity of both the person paying, and the person being paid. Authenticity being "are they being themselves?", and sincerity being "do they want you to know themselves?" and vica versa.
Is a person being friendly because they like me or because they are counting the dollar signs in their head? Do they really want to get to know me or are they simply being polite, i.e. applying social lubricant?
I don’t have a single host from my AirBnB stays that I remember fondly, if at all. I have several Couch-surfers who I miss dearly and who message me from time to time on Facebook.
I feel that it’s possible to make real friends with people you start with on a “business level”, but until that “business” gets removed, the relationship is just a thin veneer over what is essentially a transaction.
couchsurfing is marketed as "a great way to meet locals", as a way to find new friends, so people who list their places on it are more likely to be interested in making friends with their stayers.
airbnb is mostly positioned as a "turn your home into a hotel" website, so many airbnb hosts operate it like a business and are not necessarily looking to make friends with the clients.
Overall I agree that it is self-defeating to directly pay for a friend. But you can find friends everywhere, even (indirectly) at the opposite end of business transactions.
As another example, clubs and classes are a great place to make friends because you already have a common interest. You can become friends with the instructor/leader no matter what the monetary arrangements are. Whether there are dues or class fees, if the instructor gets paid a token or reasonable amount. Of course, the more of a profession it is for the instructor, the more likely they are to be spread thin across classes and students. But again, that's not the money per se.
With couchsurfing, i've tried both hosting and surfing. Hosting felt like I was managing a free hotel - the guests seemed to have little interest in hanging out or socializing at all. They just stuck to each other. Maybe my mistake was allowing couples instead of individual travellers. I never got a chance to surf, all requests were denied, I get the sense that you basically have to be female and traveling without a partner to succeed in surfing. Context: 29 yr old asian american male, no deformities or anything like that.
With AirBnB, most of the time, it was just a business relationship, but I did form a few friendships which lasted a while.
Of course, anecdotes are not proof - I think it really shows that it is more the luck of the draw than anything else.
You might be right that money plays a part, but it is far from the only variable in play.
i agree with the comment noting expectations, and also want to emphasise that i have spent lots of time with either type of houseguest
but what i have found interesting is it is easier to fall into spending time when the money exchanging hands is roughly the amount i would want to pay for the service
for instance, on airb.. i have set my price on the room i offer both under, on, and over what i myself would want to pay for the room
when i charge less than what i would pay for my space i can get guests that i feel are rude or disrespectful to me, my home, andor my neighbors
if i charge more than i would want to pay for the space, i can get people who have high expectations: arguably, fair expectations on what they get for the price; or are just absent because someone else paid the bill and they are there to work
when i charge a rate that i think would be fair if i were to be paying for the space i find i spend more time with the people
the worst part is when you enjoy the time you spend with people you know are going back home across the country or globe
The places that I used couchsurfing are the most memorable. I travelled for a whole year in 09-10 and the 5 times that we used couchsurfing to stay at someone's place was incredible and I'm still in contact with 2/5 of those stays. 40% hit rate I guess. Back then Airbnb wasn't a thing (or wasn't a big thing, can't think at the top of my head when they started) so it was either hostels or couchsurfing. You get different flavours of travel between those two. You meet more travellers in hostels which is a very different trip and experience vs staying with a local and hanging with them. It's interesting to see the perspective change between just the accommodation choice.
This year I travelled for 3 months and since I was working remotely I wanted to make sure I was productive and had my own space to think and do work with good wifi. So that meant NO hostels really. Horrible wifi in them, they're loud and usually dorms meant not a lot of me space. When looking at private hostels compared to Airbnb rentals the price wasn't that much more for a full studio in most cities so I stayed only 3 nights in hostels the whole trip.
Airbnb is great for feeling at home (full kitchen, couches, etc) and having everything you need to be productive and I made sure the wifi was great in each place before booking. But when grabbing the whole place I never interacted with my hosts since they weren't there. I never did stay in a private room so I can't comment on that experience and getting to meet the hosts that way which would probably feel more couchsurfing like.
But I did a hybrid take on my travels. I stayed in Airbnb places but would reach out to couchsurfers to meet up. And the response was so much better when you don't need accommodation since a lot of hosts just get bombarded with automated messages begging for 'free' places to stay. It helped me meet a lot of individuals in every city we stayed and it was the same great feeling when I stayed at people's places on the last trip.
The hybrid approach was pretty awesome and made me not feel lonely since the couchsurfers were a great source of information on what to do and explore and much of the time they did those activities with me.
I am still in contact with many of those couchsurfers from this past trip as well. I've hosted in my place and found that hosting helped connect also. I've never rented out on Airbnb so I can't comment on the other side of that.
For better or worse, once I got into my mid-30s, I started wondering about dollar signs in people's intentions in general, unless I met them in the context of a hobby.
I think it would be cool to have this kind of thing: AirBnB for Friends, but I don't think my need was a 'personal void' to be filled, just a function of being a social person with a socially unconducive job.
It may be a personal void for many (perhaps most), but shouldn't have to be.
[Edit:] Also, "wondering about dollar signs in people's intentions", yeah, same, but another reason that a specific transaction wouldn't be a bad thing.
A service to find someone to hang out with and show you around while traveling would end up becoming "Uber for Escorts" or some kind of Uber-Tinder hybrid.
For example Adult Friend Finder was started to actually find friends:
>In 1994, Andrew Conru created the first online dating site, WebPersonals. After selling that site in 1995, he launched FriendFinder.com, an early social networking site intended to help people connect with likeminded activity partners, in 1996.[3] Days after the site went live, Conru found that people were posting naked pictures of themselves and seeking partners for adult-oriented activities.
I find this to be incredibly true in the US as well. I'm a university student, and there is a marked difference between how I know my friends are feelings vs. how they post on social media. I went through a long period of depression a few years ago because (for a variety of reasons) I was isolated from most of my good friends. Spending tons of time with them on social media didn't make me happy. It was confusing, feeling like I was still in touch with all my friends but at the same time not getting any of the usual positive emotions.
There's really nothing like human companionship.
EDIT: I say "how my friends post on social media" because I stopped using it. I'll log in and skim every once in a while but I stopped posting about myself entirely a few years ago. Instead, I try to call or email my friends. For some reason, email feels much, much more personal than Facebook. I've really gotten to know some of my friends better by writing back and forth with them. Different media inspire different conversations, I guess.
The result was that most people discarded traditional social value systems and customs on a wholesale basis. The traditional ways of interacting with others began to be seen as horribly old-fashioned, conservative, imperialist, stodgy, and above all profoundly unfashionable.
However, they failed to create a coherent new system of customs and values to replace the ones they discarded. The result was the atomization of society, the lack of the shared mores, norms, and contexts that traditionally produced the conditions necessary to find friendship.
Something very similar happened in California with the mass adoption of countercultural criticisms of traditional society in the 1960s and 1970s, which now manifests as a sort of pervasive social awkwardness and atomization.
The trend lags a few years behind Tokyo, but I imagine before too long, San Francisco too will have "rent-a-friend" services to fill the void created by the lack of shared social mores and customs that traditionally allowed people to make friends.
The problem is that the baby is too often thrown out with the bathwater. Specific criticisms of specific areas, however valid they may be, are almost imperceptably broadened, bit by bit, year by year, until they become categorical condemnations of "traditional society" ("the Man") in general, no longer in regard to any specific thing but as a generic reified abstraction to be combatted.
I mean I'm a 9-5 programmer who likes to learn off-hours and sometimes I'm envious of the Silicon Valley salaries, but then I see the 90+ hour weeks that are expected along with the rent you unfortunate souls have to pay, and all I can think is NOPE! I'd rather make somewhat less money so I can have at least some choice in my life rather than be completely owned by my boss like some kind of indentured servant!
This whole scenario seems really terrifying! After reading that article I seriously physically felt like I just read a really good existential horror story. My skin is still crawling!
He only could visit the U.S. once he quit IBM.
In Japan, yes. Unpaid overtime is still normal, though the government is trying to cut back on it via laws, etc. As far as the other questions go, idk.
But you hear about things like negative population growth, husbands who never talk to their kids, wives who are basically house servants, shut-ins, etc. Though nothing can be called THE reason for any of this, all of this stuff is connected through culture.
If you're a Japanese man raised by middle class parents, the prospect of working as a cashier or janitor implies:
You will never have economic security. Substantially all cashiers are hourly contract workers; virtually all janitors are. (The janitorial exceptions are government employees.) Contract workers can have their employment terminated in a fashion similar to in the United States. This contrasts markedly with the traditional expectation of the Japanese middle class, which is lifetime employment.
Your parents will consider you a failure, principally because you have failed in the one thing men are expected to do.
You will find your dating and marriage prospects markedly curtailed. You will be considered a loser by the vast majority of young women who you wish to date. Some will tell you that, in as many words. Many will prefer euphemisms like "My ideal boyfriend is someone who has debuted in society." Honest labor as a cashier is not considered honest labor in the Japanese middle class, at least not for a member of the middle class.
Japan is a very status-conscious society. Cashiers and janitors occupy some of the very lowest rungs of it. You will spend most of your day being obseqiously polite to people; you will watch other people spend their fragments of your day snubbing you, repeatedly, in the ordinary course.
You have recently read of other blue-collar employees who worked service jobs dying cold and alone, because the government safety net doesn't really consider them a priority, they had no savings, and they never had a family for the above reasons.
So, tell me: given that this is your mental model of reality, and the mental model shared by substantially everyone you consider a peer or mentor, how attractive does working at 7-11 sound to you?
Oh, salient fact: if you work so much as one day at 7-11 past college you'll probably never work as a salaryman. You're damaged goods for the rest of your life. If you thought of maybe doing it for 6 months while spending your time playing in a band and then getting on with your adult life, go ask one of the 45 year olds working at 7-11 and living on ~$1,400 a month how that decision worked out for them.
The above math, or something close to it, is why most salarymen consider themselves blessed to be proper employees at a stable corporation, even if that job is actively killing them. (n.b. I'm not Japanese but I am a recovering Japanese salaryman. "Salaryman" is a local coinage which identifies full-time white collar employees of a certain strata of Japanese companies which are desirable to work at. The traditional expectation is that you sign a deal with the devil ^H^H^H^H^H your company where the company insulates you from all risks and in return you commit to the company mind, body, and soul.)
Two things I've wondered about that I'm hoping you can shed some light on...
First, do people that low on the totem pole socially have any tendencies to emigrate to societies with more open cultures about this stuff like Europe or America? I realize there can be a cost barrier, but even a cashier could save up enough to make the move if they were dedicated enough to the idea.
Second, my experience with cashiers and other service staff there was the expected flawless politeness. But beyond that, people genuinely seemed to want to go above and beyond and take pride in their job, even if it was "just as a cashier." Is my perception due to just not being well-attuned to the social/body cues of the Japanese? In America, the cashier at a 711 typically hates their job and many give off the impression of being a slacker. Some practically exude this. I never once encountered this in a 711 in Japan. So do most of the cashiers there really hate their jobs/status and just make a good show of things? Or am I just blind to the cues?
Your second question: depends on the cashier.
Note that a good portion of the things I were referring to are a result of falling out of the class you were born/raised/worked into. (Japan doesn't have classes... but Japan totally has classes.) If you never expected anything in life other than going to an agricultural high school and maybe working on the farm, like many young'uns in Gifu, then moving to Tokyo and working at a convenience store might not be catastrophic. If you expected to test into a good college, and did, and then end up working at a convenience store... that's a violation of the proper order of things.
Also, I would give non-zero credence to an explanation that a hypothetical observer who can't speak the language and has very little experience with the culture perhaps not understanding subtle distinctions like the difference between one's participation in a public social ritual and what one can tell one's closest friends when all of you are drunk. What's a good US example... hmm... OK, here's one: sincerity of religious belief. That's a spectrum, right? And Americans exist along that spectrum, right? And we have to have functioning radars for where someone is on that spectrum or it's socially disastrous, right? Imagine a hypothetical politician who pings your radar as "Absolutely zero sincere belief in any religion." Think backwards to the cues they give off to give you that impression. OK, now imagine that guy says, in response to a debate question, "Mr. $FOO, what is your favorite Bible verse?" and answers "I really like all of them, because I'm a Christian." That probably changes your radar value not at all, right? Because that's exactly what you'd expect a politician to say? The modal Japanese person, who probably does not have as good a radar on this issue as you do, will probably be confused as to why you think this politician is not religious when he just said something religious and claimed belief in a religion. And you could imagine writing a fairly long anthropological comment on a message board to that person saying "No, no, that's just the way we do things here. That question always gets asked and not having an answer to it, or disputing the basis for the question, would be political suicide. He's pretending to care about it and we pretend, for form's sake, to believe him." whereupon the Japanese person would say "Wow, you crazy Americans, so inscrutable."
[ + ] "What, like nationalism?" Not exactly the sense that I meant it in. Try on your mental model of a nationalist American for a moment: suppose an American spends several years abroad then comes back. Is this happy or sad? Happy, of course, because America is clearly the best place to live in the world and of course Americans would prefer to live in America, like everyone else would if they had the opportunity. A Japanese nationalist, on the other hand, would more typically say that the returning Japanese person is a sad event because the traitor will probably bring their foreign contagion with them. Is there even a word in English for what I'd be if I moved back to America next year? "What, an American?" No, a word which describes "previously lived a long while in another country." Japanese has a word for this (slight oversimplification for brevity going on here but I'm thinking of 帰国子女) and if it describes you you have challenges associated with that.
I've read that Japan's younger generations are starting to break free from the mold of "lifetime employment" and similar concepts as corporations have begun to show less and less loyalty to their employees as they become more competitive globally, and as Japan becomes more Westernized. Have you seen signs of that? Are the days of the traditional salaryman numbered?
The whole concept of the salaryman has always been fascinating to me. On the one hand, you have Japan, which is probably up there with Germany when one looks up the definition of "efficiency" in the dictionary. On the other, you have this concept of people working insane hours which have been proven to be less productive than when people actually get solid rest, have good work/life balance, etc. in terms of actual output, reduction in errors, and things that generally align with the concept of kaizen.
I have this notion in my head that Japanese corporate culture is extremely inefficient, with people essentially just creating endless bureaucracy and shuffling paper back and forth. Can you comment on any of these things?
My view on Japanese corporate efficiency is essentially that Japan had a few things going right for it, including a de-facto world monopoly on applied mathematics ("which is useful"), which lasted for a few decades. Those were very, very good decades, and no amount of other inefficiency in Japanese companies/government/etc could make a monopoly on math lose. ("Monopoly" is a slight exaggeration for effect.)
Japan no longer has a monopoly on math. It took ~30 years, but Ford and GM spent enough time looking at Toyota such that they can make a car which is, if not a Toyota, at least not a death trap. Korea and China skipped directly from dirt-poor nations to industrial-powerhouses-who-can-math without taking the US' 200 year detour through "Let's try running factories like they are public schools and public schools like they are factories." Meanwhile, the US becomes the global center for software (which works out swimmingly) and Japan becomes the global center for robots (which works out swimmingly if one owns robots but not so much if one competes with them) while cranking up industrial output and industrial efficiency but concentrating the gains of it rather than passing them around many folks as previously happened.
It's North American culture to be able to think outside the box (regardless of how bad the public school systems are here) which is why most of the innovation comes from here. It is also why the factories are mostly in Asia, because the process of streamlining production has a lot to do with getting the math right.
I was at the Tsukomo store a few weeks back. I was underwhelmed :(. I thought it would be bigger.
My next stop is Huaqiangbei. I have a feeling it's going to be a zoo.
I went to Japan for vacation a few years ago. I have some bad allergies so in many small stores (conbini?) I went up to the cashier with some stuff and a machine translated note about my allergies.
The cashier seriously read the content list of everything I brought, then made two piles of things I can eat and things I couldn't eat. Every damn time. We are talking almost a statistical sample here.
That wouldn't happen anywhere else I've been, or even heard about. [Edit: I do claim to know this better than patio11, since he knows the subject area a thousand times better than me. He is too close. Do ask him about why/how, I saw the difference. And yes, I come from a place high on the social trust scale. There is still a big difference.]
Edit 2: About the subject matter of renting friends, buying used underwear, etc. You need to make a difference between common phenomenons and extreme phenomenons in a tens of millins of people area. The tail end of the Bell curve with so many people is weird.
I get that my question may have sounded like "Can't these bums just stop complaining and rent a small apartment and live lean?", but I figured if that was an option, they'd do that, but I had no idea why. Thank you for posting as to the reason this doesn't happen.
For a bit of background, both of my roommates work at Wal-Mart, and while they don't enjoy as much spending money as I do they certainly aren't treated like garbage like Japanese convenience store workers are.
Me: "Cool spot you've got here man. Must be fun?" Dude: "Yes, for bit. But I'm 35."
* Silence*.
He starts telling me about how the novelty has worn off and he's stuck between a rock and a hard place and how wearing hip-hop garb has an expiry date.
I know - these are concerns of young adults everywhere - but found his deadpan awareness of the increasing opportunity-cost interesting (and hilarious, at the time).
I mean, it sucks, but it should suck in a gender balanced way.
Plenty of people enjoy Silicon Valley salaries with 40 hour work weeks. I expect that most people with those salaries work closer to 40 hours than 60. In fact, I don't personally know anyone who works more than 50 hours a week unless they're building a startup and it's their baby.
I don't mean to pick on you, it's just that I read things like this...
>> I'd rather make somewhat less money so I can have at least some choice in my life rather than be completely owned by my boss like some kind of indentured servant!
...on HN all the time, and every single time I think to myself, "You can have both!"
I'm not denying that there exist jobs with work-life balances that resemble dystopian hellscapes full of abject misery, but it's just frankly not the norm.
I have never ever heard of this in a SV job unless it's a startup and they have ownership. I see folks working 50 hours a week max.
For example, in Seoul, South Korea I found this organization of university students who want to promote their culture and improve their English in the process.
I didn't want to do the typical tourist things with my colleagues, so I had two students take me around the city for a day. They were willing to tailor their tour and activities entirely to my interests. In fact, they didn't even expect me to pay for their food or things like admission tickets to museums. I certainly wasn't going to let some university students pay for me (especially when those things were comparatively cheap to me as a foreigner). I decided to rely entirely on their recommendations as locals. I had a great time!
I am inclined to organize something similar in San Francisco for tourists from across the world - meet new people and show them around for free (showing off your local pride).
I've not used the service yet, but I get the impression this is often what happens with Couchsurfing, is this something you'd be interested in trying?
But during the day or evenings I'd be happy to show people some cool spots I like (which they will probably like).
Escorts don't just do sex work. In addition to sex, this is a good deal of what escorting is, depending on who one's clients are and what they are looking for.
Well people do pay for cuddles and companionship. It's like when you aren't really that hungry you won't eat that slightly off 1 week old chicken but if you are hungry and nothing else is available it doesn't seem like such a bad idea.
Paying someone solely to behave like we have a trusting bond, that they care that I exist, is paying someone to lie to me. That's more invasive mentally than an hour of physical contact
And if I were paid to do the same, I'd think that's a pretty good gig--unless the friendship contract stipulated a certain frequency of letting the boss win, of course.
I don't need much of a trusting bond. Just eat my snacks, drink my drinks, laugh at the 10% of my jokes that actually deserve it, and take your weekly card-table curbstomping without much more than a token amount of complaints.
If I were single, I might also hire a wingman or blocker to back me up at the local meet market venues.
What I mean is, nobody actually wants, needs, or should have 100% pure honesty all the time. Does it matter if the 3.5 days out of 7 that someone puts up with my cantankerous nature is to have access to my money or the other 3.5 days that I'm shaved and showered and generally pleasant?
I can imagine it being difficult for locals to meet other locals though (if they're shy and socially awkward).