Rental Person Who Does Nothing

by Shoji Morimoto

This kind of vague relationship, which falls short of “friendship,” can be quite convenient. You don’t feel you have to worry too much about the other person—there’s no sense of expecting anything from each other.

friend, boyfriend/girlfriend/partner, couple, and so on. On the other hand, once a relationship is fixed, it seems to carry restrictions and responsibilities. If I’m somebody’s “friend” and they consult me about something, then I feel I should give advice. Every named relationship entails particular things you have to do, certain expectations that you have to meet. If A-san and I were friends and there was no more contact

As Rental Person, the way I interact with people is rather unusual, I suppose, but because of social media the number of people I “know” (without actually having met them) is growing at an overwhelming rate.

After I started Do-nothing Rental, I was often asked the following questions: “How do you live? How do you make an income?” “Why don’t you charge a fee?”

I suppose the bottom line is that doing it for nothing seemed easier. It was a new venture and I was nervous about starting up and I wanted it to be as simple as possible. I’d be doing nothing, so it seemed natural to charge nothing. And if there was no charge, the client wouldn’t be too demanding.

My main concern was to do something interesting. I had some savings, so I wanted to do something with them.

Maybe it’s best to think of it as something I’m doing for fun (like a trip abroad I’ve saved up for).

“Not what I expected,” or “What a disappointment!” So it’s best to keep people’s expectations low. If clients come without much in the way of expectations, they won’t be too disappointed.

Though I don’t charge money, I do feel I get a kind of remuneration. For one thing, as I said before, there’s the passive enjoyment and stimulation of hearing about people’s situations.

There’s certainly a difference between childhood and adulthood in terms of the cost or stress that friends or friendship involve. Friendship for an adult seems very complicated. Rather than all-round friends, people seem to have friends for specific purposes—friends to go drinking with, for example, or friends to play computer games with, and friends to go to concerts with.

In Japan people are very conscious of reciprocity.

In the first chapter, I mentioned Jinnosuke Kokoroya’s notion of “payment for being” as something that triggered the idea for this do-nothing service.

As I looked at our child, I kept thinking how wonderful that was. And I began to wish everyone

could live like a baby does, behaving just as they wanted.

A thought like that should normally be discarded well before adulthood. But there it was, and I feel it helped the Do-...