Japanese students, crushed by loneliness and shyness, rent "friends" and eat while hiding in toilets

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Requests for rent-a-friends at Client Partners are around several tens per month. Most are from young people who are bewildered by the distance they feel from other people, who are anxious, and who have lost their confidence. Abe Maki (37), a representative from the company, said:’These people don’t have any strong sense of self-worth, so they take more care than is necessary of how others judge them. Still, more often than not, they have a lot of online friends. That’s because online they have one-directional communication with people, where they don’t need to the other person to think well of them’.

For Shouta, who was able to pick himself up after attending a self-help group he looked into after being recommended to do so by his parents, the feeling of those young people who use rent-a-friend is painfully familiar. ‘They don’t really have the choice per se of going alone to a place that you should be going to with friends. It’s awful to think that people will see you as one of those losers who goes to those places alone’.