Hacker News Reader

Comment by hkmurakami | Hacker News Reader

Went into reading this article expecting it to be a one-off, rental boyfriend type deal (that kind of trope is used very frequently in movies/tv shows/manga there), but this way way deeper than I expected. I'm pretty mind blown at how far they are taking this fake/real replacements. Pretty close to some dystopian scifi actually.

>If the client never reveals the truth, I must continue the role indefinitely. If the daughter gets married, I have to act as a father in that wedding, and then I have to be the grandfather. So, I always ask every client, “Are you prepared to sustain this lie?” It’s the most significant problem our company has.

>Morin: You’re offering a more perfect form of reality?

>Yuichi: More ideal. More clean.

This is so Truman Show esque.

View on HN

Now imagine a future technology where you could undergo some hypnosis / gaslighting treatment to forget you even hired this person.

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.

>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

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.

Yes, I was thinking that this should be a Charlie Kaufman movie, or that it's like a Charlie Kaufman movie come to life.

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."

> things could get really awkward and confusing when you end up having partial memories.

All memories are partial.

Memories are modified on retrieval and colored by current emotional state and ideas (and vice versa :)). So they're not even partial. They're messy re-imaginations of past re-imaginations.

read-modify-write

Look up the movie _Synecdoche_, where a theater production about the producing of a theater production (about... (about... )...) starts recursively eating real life.

There is no way another person doesn't get emotionally invested in their role the only difference is your paying them to put up with your shit and pretend to be your ideal one.

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.

he basically goes through all the bad parts of a relationships without being able to complain.

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

He definitely knows it's the customer that tends to forget weather intentionally or unintentionally.

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.

This was explored (all the way to its grim dystopian conclusion) in tv series Dollhouse. Might want to check it out.

I only watched the first season, but wasn't it the reverse of the suggestion?

The later seasons explained things a bit more if I remember correctly. There was more to it than what was in the first season.

The second season also went completely off the rails with the mind reprogramming noise that can be broadcast over the radio or a phone line. They also glossed over the whole "Your body will have a police record thicker than the backup dancers in a rap video when we put your mind back in it, and also you will be wanted for treason." problem. Luckily they collapsed society before that problem came up.

Spoiler alert The dolls aren't the only ones that have their minds tampered with by the end of the show.

WestWorld too.

Spoiler ahead

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.

Employees also ambiguous.

At least one of the employees is a host, the one played by Elon Musk's ex wife.

Less Dollhouse and more Eternal Sunshine for a Spotless Mind (except making memories instead of removing them) .. makes me thinkg of the new Blade Runner a bit too

This would make an incredible Black Mirror episode.

I was thinking the same thing. At first instance it reminded me of "Be right back" episode

You might begin to suspect all your close friends are really just paid actors if that became possible...

Yeah have you noticed how your friends are always checking the time discreetly and tend to meet you and suddenly need to leave on the hour or the half-an-hour?

Without going into too much detail, Oldboy [0] has a bit that reminds me of this.

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

And to prevent further awkwardness, the acting company would need insurance to pay for a replacement actor, if the original actor playing your mother died... it's turtles all the way down!

No, your wife unaware that you'd hired a fake mother will hire a fake you when you die least it break your geriatric mother's heart. Now you'll have two actors unknowingly interacting in perpetuity.

Sounds very similar to what the Dollhouse TV series was about.

isnt that kind of the premise of Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind?

> Pretty close to some dystopian scifi actually.

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.

There's a great documentary about host clubs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pW0RV2nSg0

Thanks for sharing, it's really very well made! I always wondered what kind of women would earn enough money to visit host clubs, the answer is quite depressing, just like pretty much everything about these social dynamics, lonely broken people lying to other lonely broken people.

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.

Same here. I can't help but wonder about the ethical implications of lying to a child about something so fundamental for her entire lifetime.

The article specifically mentions the positive outcome of the arrangement - the young woman's confidence has improved, destructive behaviour stopped, bullying stopped, and she has the father figure she obviously needs at this critical part of her development. And from all appearances he is genuinely doing his best to be that.

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?

It seems positive from what he says, but we only have one side of the story.

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?

This question should be possible to be semi-answered by psychology studies. Do stability during the teen years outweigh a large negative event during adolescence? Seems like a question that researchers has been poking at for the last 100 years.

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.

Her real father left.

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.

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

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?

He may have sent an actor along to represent him for the interview / photoshoot.

> the young woman's confidence has improved, destructive behaviour stopped, bullying stopped

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.

Being a real parent is essentially pretending to be a good parent most of the time, because you have no idea what you're doing. This guy just does the same thing in four hour chunks for $200 a pop, while the real thing doesn't get a wage or keep fixed business hours.

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.

> How about having a decent society

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.

You are dissatisfied at the situations - we all are. We all understand that society is getting more isolated. However you deflected the question "righteous crusaders for truth, if this girl was put in front of you, would you tell her?" with a completely unrelated question.

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."

> A single man cannot undo decades of societal decay.

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.

> 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.

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

We generally think it's ethically acceptable not to tell a child that they were adopted for a long while (possibly into adulthood), or not to tell a child that their biological father wasn't their mother's husband. We also find it ethically acceptable for a couple not to ask who fathered their own child.

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?

> We generally think it's ethically acceptable not to tell a child that they were adopted for a long while (possibly into adulthood), or not to tell a child that their biological father wasn't their mother's husband.

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.

the difference in regards to adoption is that adoptive parents actually love you, while in this case is strictly for show. I'm not sure why you would lie about this anyways.

"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.

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

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

I think this was referring to sperm donation.

It's not lie if everybody accepts and supports it, merely a convention.

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

Sorry, but it's just terrible. The mother is paying $200/month for a service that could disappear at any moment.

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.

I think the fact that the daughter or her surrounding world has troubles rooted in the lack of father representation is the terrible part.

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 mother is paying $200/month for a service that could disappear at any moment.

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

Presumably if her mom is about to run out of money, she pays for a final session where the dad gets hit by a car and has a funeral, right?

If it costs $18,000 USD for a wedding, I wonder what it would cost for a funeral. Likely more than $200.

The daughter doesn't support it

It’s common to lie to children about religious dogma. Society is currently still accustomed to lying about fundamental issues.

True, and it may be unavoidable. The human species needs myths and storytelling to form cohesive societies. Make-believe is the cornerstone of money, government, social contract and so on.

We do that sort of thing already - see Santa Claus for example, where children are continually lied to about the identity of the person who brings them presents.

Children are not stupid. They know.

And yet grown-ass adults can believe that an alien overlord flew their souls to Earth millions of years ago in space-faring DC-10s and blew them up in volcanoes, or that you can baptize the idea of a person long after they have died, or that the strongest wolf is held down by chains made by dwarves from widows' sighs and morning mist, or that the Earth is flat, or that putting money in a brass dish will spread your values around the world.

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.

The TV Series "Dollhouse" also explores this, although there the actors can only be rented on a day-to-day basis and their memory is wiped (OR IS IT?) after every assignment.

Gibson's Neuromancer touches on this with the backstory for how Molly Millions paid for her cybernetic enhancements as a "meat puppet".

That seems like a wiser operating plan. Avoids any long term deception.

You should check how Dollhouse ends then :) .

Suddenly and without resolution? :)

Like every other Fox sci-fi series. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me five times, shame on me.

I thought they destroyed society by the end? All of the nuanced ethical considerations replaced by straight up supervillainy with mind reprogramming noise being broadcast over the radio to everybody in the world and turning them into crazed murderers.

It's a remarkable piece. But plenty of 'real' relationships are maintained partly by paying for them, too - think of the friend who always picks up the tab, the boyfriend or suitor who pays for dinner and buys gifts for his lover. A Marxian could even claim that traditional families aren't so different... The temporary nature and upfront pricetag though are distinctive.

We all create our own version of reality, and this is just an intentional, multi person extension of that. That's what most "entourages" are anyway - basically rent a friends. I see nothing wrong with living in a more advanced fantasy land if you can afford it.

Truman Show yes, but even more like The Wedding Ringer.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com