He’ll sit with you while you eat or keep your place in a queue. How has Shoji Morimoto turned merely existing into a money-spinning phenomenon — at £165 a go?
Ben Mitchell, The Times, July 1 2023.
At the start of 2018, Shoji Morimoto was quietly drifting through a life he found increasingly difficult. Despite a postgraduate degree in physics from the prestigious Osaka University, he had spent most of his career in educational publishing working alongside colleagues who could not understand this skinny young man’s complete lack of ambition. Where his peers craved responsibility, acclaim and any opportunity to project themselves onto the world, Morimoto seemed content only when unnoticed and undisturbed. This passivity seemed to spark anger in some. On work nights out, he would sit in silence and nurse a beer while his boss heaped insults on him. He was, he was told, a “permanent vacancy”. It was impossible to tell whether he was alive or dead. His presence in the workplace literally made no difference whatsoever.
The worst part was that Morimoto knew his boss was not wrong. Decision-making stressed him out inordinately. He was allergic to teamwork. Mundane office tasks were liable to cause him a deep, abiding unease. “Even making a simple telephone call was something I just couldn’t get used to,” he says. “I wasn’t good at anything.” He was 34 years old. He was unsuccessful and he was unhappy. Perhaps, above all else, he was anonymous. To have called him a “nobody” would not have been cruel. It would simply have been true.
Then everything changed. Today, heis famous, both in his native Japan and increasingly beyond. He has one million followers on social media. He has become an object of fascination and the subject of regular news reports around the world. The story of Morimoto’s life has been turned into a manga comic book and in 2021 was adapted into a 12-part Japanese TV drama. He is about to release a memoir.
• Lonely, bored Japanese queue up to rent man who does nothing
So what happened? What did someone who “wasn’t good at anything” do to become so celebrated? The answer contains within it a strange sort of logic. He did nothing. Five years ago, having left his job in publishing and feeling disillusioned after his early impetus to make it as a freelance writer fizzled out, he began to advertise a particular service online. The proposition was straightforward. Members of the public could hire him. “I’m available for any situation in which you want a person to be there,” he tweeted. “Maybe there’s a restaurant you want to go to, but you feel awkward going on your own. Maybe a game you want to play, but you’re one person short. Or perhaps you’d like someone to keep a space in the park for your cherry blossom viewing party.”
He would travel to wherever they needed him to be — the only condition was that he was not asked to do anything that could be considered work. He would not, he explained, take a job that required him to use his initiative or make decisions, or even make conversation beyond trotting out a few bland, simple responses: “Oh yes?” “Oh really?” “I see.”
He called his service Do-Nothing Rental. Within a few days, a student got in touch and asked if he would be willing to come to Kokubunji station in Tokyo and spend a couple of hours holding a balloon. They were doing a school project and needed somebody anonymous-looking to hold the balloon while they took photos of it. Morimoto decided that, yes, he could probably do this. All he asked, at this point, was that his client paid his transport expenses, which they did. He even got to keep the balloon afterwards.
Gradually, he began to attract more requests from more potential clients. Someone relocating from Tokyo to Osaka asked if he would wave her off as her train left the platform, just like they do in films. Someone asked if he would sit in the same room as them as they attempted to hit a work deadline, in the hope that his presence would make them too self-conscious to get distracted.
Another client asked if they could arrange to pass each other on the pavement and then have Morimoto “make a fuss” over their dog. The dog, the client explained, loved getting attention from new people, but the owner felt too self-conscious to let him jump up at strangers and so would tug him away, only to feel guilty afterwards.
One woman asked him to go with her to a courthouse as she filed her divorce proceedings, then accompany her to a restaurant for lunch. Her rationale, she said, was that doing something a little odd like this would make an otherwise maudlin day memorable for a different reason. Morimoto agreed to all these requests, which were straightforward and demanded very little of him beyond his physical presence. His clients, in turn, were all very happy.
Despite starting as a borderline novelty project, demand for Morimoto’s do-nothing services has boomed. Today, he is able to charge ¥30,000 (£165) per job. Some jobs are as straightforward as, “Please think of me on this particular day because I have an exam,” or, “Please text me at this particular time to remind me to pack my gym kit.”
“I’ve just put the price up,” says Morimoto, which has dented demand a little, but he is still constantly busy. “I’ve averaged about 60 to 70 requests a month for the past few months.”
What does all this say about the world in which we now live? And what does Morimoto’s rise from obscurity say about him? It is now evening in Tokyo and the 39-year-old is sitting in a soundproof, pay-by-the-hour karaoke booth near the sprawling Shinjuku station. Outside, thousands of commuters rush to and fro, forming great swells that swirl and dissipate to the rhythm of the train timetable. Inside the booth, all is still and peaceful. He is wearing a plain white T-shirt and a blue cap, a utilitarian outfit that has become something of a trademark. “I wear pretty much the same style every day,” he says. “It wasn’t a conscious decision, but it’s simple and memorable.”
It is important to say that Morimoto genuinely loves renting himself out. He sees it as less of a job and more of a hobby from which he draws a deep satisfaction. He has a wife and a child who was just a baby when he first began offering his services online. Early on, his enthusiasm for crisscrossing Japan and doing nothing in the company of strangers caused serious tension.
“Yes, there have been conflicts,” he says. In the autumn of 2019, for example, he had become obsessed with his new identity and could vanish for days at a time. People would message him to ask if he would come to their café bang on opening time to encourage them to get everything set up, or if he would wait for them at the finish line of a marathon. And, provided the task was not too demanding, he would say yes. “I loved what I was doing,” he says. “I was really, really, really into it and wanted to do it 24/7. Sometimes I didn’t even bother to go home. I really thought it was just a waste of time to go back and forth. I was just so busy. But my child was still so small and, obviously, my wife wasn’t happy about it.”
The fact that, to begin with, he was offering his services for free and was living off savings probably did not help matters. There was, he says, a period during which he and his wife ended up living apart. “I can’t really go into the details,” he says, a little apologetically. “But we are both happy now and living in peace and harmony.”
Why was Morimoto so drawn to the idea of doing nothing? And why is it still so important to him now? These questions underpin much of his new book, Rental Person Who Does Nothing: A Memoir, which, he is keen to point out, he did not write himself — that would be too much like “doing something”. Instead, it is the result of him being asked hundreds of questions by an editor, who then pieced the book together with his responses.
The result is a beguiling kind of picaresque, punctuated by dozens of strange, often dreamlike encounters: the man who has not had a house guest in years and who eagerly cooks him delicious dish after delicious dish, later to confess that he has served time for killing someone. The woman who took him to Tokyo Disney Resort. The girl who requested he come to visit her in hospital, only for him to discover she had bipolar disorder and was in an isolation unit after taking a drug overdose. They play a board game together and he listens to her talk about her experiences, which he says he found “fascinating”.
In person, Morimoto is articulate and appears at ease. Since childhood, however, he has struggled in group situations. “When I was a child, I was good at studying, but I wasn’t the type to make friends,” he says. “I was quiet.” He says he had an anxiety disorder known as selective mutism. “I wouldn’t speak a word in the classroom. I knew I was different from everyone and I felt inferior. I was good at anything that was happening in my own head, but conformity or working with others? I just couldn’t do it.”
This is part of the reason he has ended up being Rental Person Who Does Nothing, a role in which almost all his interactions are one to one and where he is not expected to say very much anyway. I also think there is more going on. In his memoir, he mentions, in a very matter-of-fact way, how his older brother “messed up” his university entrance exam, became depressed and as a result has never had a job. Then, he continues, his older sister struggled to find the right career path. When she didn’t get a job she wanted, she took her own life. Witnessing his siblings try and fail to find their place in the world of work must, I say, have informed his decision to turn his back on conventional employment.
He considers this. “I can’t quite tell myself how what happened to my siblings influenced me,” he says. “But what happened, I think, is that they couldn’t really go into society. That’s what we say in Japan: ‘go into society’. It means that you are becoming a proper grown-up. In modern society, in Japanese society, you have to be a proper adult to be acceptable, but my brother and sister couldn’t work, so they weren’t accepted. They were rejected by society. And that just made me determined that I don’t want to be in a world where my siblings weren’t accepted.”
It wasn’t like Morimoto himself hadn’t tried to fit in. “I went to university. I made a great effort,” he says. “I got a job and I wanted to get on with people, and I wanted to be like other people. I tried harder and harder, but I just couldn’t do it. However hard I tried, I wouldn’t be able to be like the others.”
He says all this directly, without self-pity. The lights of the karaoke booth blink and flash behind him. Outside, faintly muffled, is the noise of traffic and people and trains. He says he still feels a residual anger. “But an anger not necessarily towards society, but more the atmosphere of society, that you’re not worth anything if you don’t do anything, and that you have to be productive. And I just want to say, ‘No. Everybody is worth their existence.’ ”
I ask if he thinks loneliness is a factor in his success, if there is perhaps something intrinsic to 21st-century life that makes people yearn for human intimacy in a world where so much socialisation takes place online. He says he is not sure — he has a tendency to duck out of overarching analysis, possibly because it does feel like hard work — but says that many of his clients seem to have perfectly good relationships with their friends and family. Indeed, he continues, it is often the case that people want to employ him in order to talk about stuff they would not otherwise feel comfortable sharing with those close to them.
“As Rental Person, I have only the flimsiest connection with my clients,” he says in his memoir. “I am practically transparent. They have a story they have to tell and it’s my role to be there while they tell it. In one of Aesop’s fables, a character longs to tell a secret and so tells it to the reeds. I’m just there, like those reeds.”
He listened to one man talk about how he had grown up in a notorious cult, but rather than being traumatised by his childhood, still thought the leader was admirable. He accompanied another man on a walk past his old primary school and listened to him talk about the bullying he endured there. During the pandemic, he spent a lot of time listening to doctors and nurses talking about how difficult things were. “They were extremely stressed, under huge stress,” he says. “They want to talk to people, but they can’t really moan to their colleagues about how hard their lives are because everybody is having a hard time. So these people came to me.”
On the flipside, during Covid quite a few teachers got in touch with him because they wanted to express to somebody just how great it was not having to teach loads of kids every day. “They were actually happy,” says Morimoto. “But you can’t go around telling everybody how happy you are because of Covid, so they told me about it.”
At best, Morimoto is an impassive confessor. He does not advise or commiserate or look people in the eye and tell them he understands. Usually, he says, the people telling him things don’t even want this of him. They just need him there, doing nothing, while they speak. Those who have never used him often think he is motivated by benevolence. He wants to be clear that he is not. “Many people have this misconception that I provide the services with compassion and kindness,” he says. “And actually, I’m not like that. I’m not particularly friendly.”
Even if he won the lottery, he says he would continue to do what he does. “Because I’m not doing this for money,” he says. “I’m doing it because I enjoy it.” He would probably buy an apartment in central Tokyo, simply to make doing his job ― not that it’s a job ― easier.
Before he gets up to leave and rejoin the millions of people outside, he smiles. The whole thing, he says, is very strange. He is a celebrity. “They made a TV series about me. I’m publishing a book. I have media interest, not only from Japan, but from abroad. I am still astonished and surprised. It still feels so surreal. I never imagined this when I started out.”
Book extract
I want to know how I feel when I’m with another living creature. Would you be prepared to spend between six hours and a day with me?
The client had been living alone for so long that he’d forgotten what it was like for there to be someone else in his space, so he wanted me to spend quite a long time with him in his house. Actually, his request message included something more: “There is something about my background I have always had to hide. I’d like you to hear what it is. I can’t tell anybody else.”
The first part of his request was met, I think – at least, the visit seemed to have had a positive effect. He seemed happy and reassured to find that his sense of taste was not odd. He drank quite a lot a drinker and as the alcohol flowed, he also provided some home-made dishes – barbecued pork slices and kimchi, as well as octopus with wild parsley sauce, which he prepared there and then. They all tasted good and he beamed when I told him so. ‘I’m glad you like them!’ he said. He had a small fridge full of drinks and he told me to take whatever I wanted. I met up with him in the morning and must have spent about six and a half hours nibbling on snacks. Maybe because I was there so long, he eventually remembered to close the door when he went to the bathroom.
We’d been chatting for quite some time when, finally, in a very off-hand way, he started talking about his hidden past. “I was in a young offenders’ institution when I was a teenager,” he said.
“Oh yes?” I said, nodding as I normally do.
“Well, yes,” he said quietly. “Actually, I… er… killed someone.”
From the moment I’d first seen him, I’d assumed that he was a professional — a doctor, or something like that. He was well organised and looked successful. I was amazed that a person like him could have killed someone. Somehow it really took me aback to think that a person who cooked so well, who gave an overall impression of competence, could have such a dark past. The incongruity had a real impact on me. In a way, I was very moved.
Since then, I think I’ve looked at people in a different way, realizing that even the most ordinary, upright-looking people are not what they seem.
HERE’S THE RENTAL PERSON THREAD that’s attracted the biggest response so far. I think it was popular because it highlighted something only a human could do:
Request: To bump into my dog on a walk and make a fuss of him.
Reason: My dog loves people. He goes up to people without dogs and wags his tail, but most of them ignore him, so he gets disappointed. People with dogs often make a fuss of him, but they’re busy walking their own dogs and don’t have much time, so I try to walk him away, but then my dog gives a little whine and sometimes tries to follow the other person. I don’t want him to be thought too irritating so I cajole him into leaving them be, but he always looks upset. He is very positive and gets over it quickly, but it hurts me a bit every time his boundless love comes to nothing, so I always think how nice it would be if a complete stranger would give him some attention.
So I was wondering if you could make a fuss of him, pretending to be a complete stranger who happens to be walking in the opposite direction.
@morimotoshoji A request for me to have a chance meeting with a dog. Why? Because the dog is overflowing with love. He was really cute. The client said that the dog was sad after I left them at the station, his tail tucked between his legs.
This thread had 170,000 likes last time I checked. People must have been attracted by the cute photo of the dog and the nice request message too. It also happened to be Cats’ Day in Japan (February 22), so dog lovers may have been feeling susceptible. Anyway, for me it was a request that put a spotlight not so much on dogs, but on the way humans love them. With the reminder request, people were surprised that a human had handled something that AI could do; I wondered what the reaction would have been if the dog request had been handled by AI. After I’d been petting the dog for a while, the client gave me a hand wipe. She said she always took some with her on a walk for anybody who touched the dog.
It was a very human request, kind in every way.
I GOT A REPEAT REQUEST to watch a person studying. This time they didn’t come to the station and so I made my way to the flat by memory. I went straight in, did nothing particular while I was there, and when time was up, I left. I began to wonder whether this really made sense.
Sometimes when people ask me to come to their homes, they want me to eat food that they’ve prepared. One woman was interested in starting her own restaurant and wanted to know how it felt to have a stranger eat her food. My only impression was that it tasted good, so I said so, to which she responded ‘I’m glad’.’
She was married and her husband wasn’t there, so the situation felt a bit unconventional. It was July 2018, soon after I’d started Rental Person Who Does Nothing, and I was feeling my way as to what “doing nothing” really meant. While I was there, the client’s mother telephoned. The client was a rather unusual person and after talking for a short time, she said to her mother, “Rental Person’s here. I’ll put him on,” and passed me her phone. There was nothing else for it, so I said, “Hello, Rental Person here.”
“Are you having an affair with my daughter?” said the mother.
“No,’ I said. ‘I’m doing nothing.”
It was rather an odd conversation.
Extracted from Rental Person Who Does Nothing: A Memoir by Shoji Morimoto is published on July 6 by Picador at £14.99. To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk or call 020 3176 2935. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members