Photo: Takuya Matsuyama / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0. Cropped.

Who are your people?

It's Saturday and there's an exhibition you'd like to see. You scroll your phone, stop at a few names, and think: they're probably busy, never mind. Or you've had a hard day and want to talk, but not be heavy. Who do you actually call?

For most of us the list is shorter than we expected. Some of us have moved cities, or countries. Some of us have a family we love and still don't call about the small things.

For most of history nobody had to think about it. Your people came with your life: the family you were born into, the neighbours down the road, the people you worked beside for decades. Those ties are loosening in a lot of places. Now you have to build the list yourself, and not everyone finds that easy.

Into that gap has stepped a new kind of person. Shoji Morimoto told Reuters in September 2022 that he had been booked some 4,000 times in four years, at 10,000 yen a time, to be wherever clients wanted him and "do nothing in particular." One client had hired him 270 times. I want to ask whether someone like that can be one of your people, and how we got to a place where he exists.

The person who does nothing

"Basically, I rent myself out," he told Reuters. He eats when you eat, and "I answer their simple questions with simple answers." He won't move a fridge or do anything sexual. And he doesn't play a role, unlike the agencies that rent out actors as family. Family Romance lists 20,000 yen for a four-hour family stand-in. Morimoto turns up as himself.

To see what his clients want, I read what he posts on X. Not everything gets posted: on 3 October he wrote that there are plenty of requests he has been asked not to share. So this is a sample of what he chooses to show, not a census. I sorted the 39 request posts he published between 30 September and 21 October 2026 by hand. Fifteen were about going somewhere, or eating something, that felt hard to do alone. Six were about being listened to. Three were about filling a seat. One was about being watched while working. Fourteen were a mix.

The requests are small, the kind most of us have wanted at some point. On 14 October, someone wanted to go to an afternoon tea in Nagoya that only took bookings for two or more, so they paid his fee plus his Shinkansen fare to be the second person at the table. On 12 October, a client had a reward dinner planned and found it hard to go alone, because friends their age have a different sense about money. On 8 October, a pregnant client wanted somewhere to vent about the small troubles of it, and hesitated to burden their husband or parents every day. On 19 October, a client nearing 50 wanted to put their life into words by telling it once, out loud, to someone with no stake in it. (The translations from Japanese are mine.)

Is he a friend?

Aristotle described three kinds of friendship in the Nicomachean Ethics: one rests on usefulness, one on pleasure, and the best on caring about the other person for their own sake. (The Stanford Encyclopedia has a summary.) Morimoto doesn't fit any of them cleanly. He is paid, so it isn't the third. He doesn't entertain you or do a task for you, so it is not obviously the first or second.

Anne Allison, an anthropologist at Duke who has studied Japan for decades, has a name for it: "shadow companionship." As she describes it, clients want the comfort of company without the stress, hassle or social skills a friend or partner would demand. Aruna Chida, 27, told Reuters something similar: "With my friends I feel I have to entertain them, but with the rental-guy I don't feel the need to be chatty."

You probably know the feeling. There are people we love, and evenings when we want company without having to be good company. Morimoto told Oricon in 2022 that many clients are finely considerate people who don't want to impose a "psychological cost" on others or on themselves. So it may be a fourth thing that Aristotle had no word for: company with the work taken out.

Presence, and a price

Simone Weil wrote that "attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity." I don't think she would count what Morimoto gives as attention. Of a repeat client who had booked him about 300 times, he told Oricon: "I deal with them strictly as a client, and I know almost nothing about their everyday life." What he gives is closer to room: a chair, a meal, a person who is simply there. If you have ever wanted to say something out loud once, you know room can be the whole point.

Does the payment spoil it? Michael Sandel argues that markets can corrupt some goods. Viviana Zelizer, in The Purchase of Intimacy, argues that money and intimacy mix all the time, and that people manage it by drawing careful lines. Morimoto's fee looks to me like one of those lines. It says what this is: company, at a set time, for a set price. We pay therapists and carers, and most of us can tell them from friends.

How we got here

It is tempting to point to one cause: late-stage capitalism, individualism, secularisation, the digital age. Each has a part, but none explains it alone. For most of human history, kinship and community covered nearly everything: care in old age, help in sickness, someone to sit with in the evening. Over the last two centuries, industrialisation and urbanisation moved people out of those networks, and markets and welfare states took on much of their work through pensions, hospitals and care homes. Maybe company is simply the next function to follow, and maybe Morimoto is what that looks like when it has a price.

The pattern is easiest to see in Japan, where it is happening fast. In 2010, NHK coined the word muen shakai, a society without ties. In 2020, 38 percent of Japanese households had one person in them, and the national institute projects 44.3 percent by 2050. Allison told me that in Japan you often need a relative to get hospital treatment or enter a care home. So paid services, and now new public schemes, have started to supply "identity guarantors" for people who have nobody, miyori ga nai hito. The private ones are expensive, she said, and the public ones are only just starting, so many people fall through the cracks. Morimoto is not a guarantor, but he sits in the same market. The emergency contact line on a clinic form is a smaller cousin of the problem: every system we build assumes somebody exists to be named.

But I don't think this is only a story of people failing. In several of the posts, the person already has others in their life: the pregnant client has a husband and parents, and the reward dinner client has friends. What they seem to lack is a way of asking that doesn't cost anything. Part of that may be a guess about how others will react. In a 2022 paper in Psychological Science, Xuan Zhao and Nicholas Epley found, across 2,118 adults, that people who needed help underestimated how willing others would be to give it, and overestimated how inconvenienced the helper would feel. A caution: such studies are mostly Western and about ordinary small requests, and I can't say how they carry to Japan, where consideration for others is a more explicit value. I mention them because many readers will recognise the feeling, wherever they live.

Why he could count

Some of his clients are not guessing wrong about anything. On 15 October, a client who had been humiliated at school asked him to send one word at a set hour: "Live." Morimoto wrote that it is strange, and remarkable, that having someone say it helps even when you were the one who asked. On 7 October, someone wrote: "just eat a meal with me." They had nobody nearby to eat with.

For them, he may be one of the few people they have. Kath Weston showed, in Families We Choose, that people build families out of friendship when blood isn't enough, and that those families are real. Morimoto never asks why clients come, so the motives are partly his inference and partly mine. "Often not only lonely" is as far as I can honestly go.

What makes someone your people

If I had to say what makes a person yours, I would say: they know something about you that the others don't, and they are around long enough for it to matter. Morimoto passes the second test for some clients and, by his own account, fails the first.

On 4 October, though, he posted about a client who had first hired him two years earlier so as not to go to a gig alone. Since then, they had made friends. This time they asked him to come and meet them. I don't know whether that is the service working or failing. But it suggests a paid, repeated companion can be less a replacement for your people than a place to practise having them.

Which leaves the list I started with. If you made it again now, write next to each name what you would feel comfortable asking them for. Then pick one thing from the shorter end and ask. There is a decent chance the list is longer than you think.