Lonely Japanese looking to live a life full of loving friends can now at least better fantasize about the idea with the aid of a service that allows buyers to rent out “fake friends” who will pose for photos, looking likely to exacerbate the main problem rather than fix it.
The service targets mostly social media users and has recently been seeing to a steady increase in requests, possibly due to its introduction on mainstream Japanese TV:
One individual who runs such a service stated “an increasing number of people don’t want their parents or friends to think they have few friends”, whilst another claimed that he recently booked 20 “friends” to attend a girls-only party and that he is constantly receiving about 20-30 requests a month.
Buyers can select the age and gender of these friends as well as what they wear and can make them attend anything from a wedding to a seminar, with one of these services charging about $74 for one customized friend for two hours.
The “fake it ’till you make it” approach to engineering fake popularity for shops via hired queues has long been popular in Japan, but whether the same tactic works for private gatherings is not clear – and certainly it seems unlikely to do anything for the self-esteem of the principal…
Better to have no friends than fake friends.
sounds like a big waste of money over petty things that no one but the buyer cares about. But if theres a marketplace than someone has to fill it. How much does it pay to be a proffessional friend? Is it like working at a host club where you have to drink dangerous amounts of alchol while showering lonely female prostitutes with love bombs?
All these fake otaku. Real ones would spend it on figurines and blu-rays.
-The Real Otaku
$300 for 2 hours with a couple friends are you fucking serious git gouged mate
If you go through your teenage/adult life with no friends you clearly must have something wrong with you psychologically, like autism. Anyone normal has at least ONE friend.