Okay, I admit it: I'm becoming an expert at renting human beings in Japan. Over the past two years, I've rented a Japanese homeless man , a family, and a NEET —a young person who is "not in education, employment, or training. The first was Omocha-kun , a music-loving man with a puppet that sings national anthems. The second was Yasashii Shufu , a gardener whom we took cosplaying in Akihabara. Both of their stories were interesting, but this article is about the Ossan Rental service in general.
I'll answer such questions as "Why the hell would you want to rent a middle-aged man? Just because something exists doesn't mean people actually want to use it. Ossan Rental has appeared in a flurry of Japanese newspapers and blogs, as well as in the occasional international story. Why not? No headline reads better than " In Japan, you can rent an old man. That's not why Mr.
Nishimoto started Ossan Rental, though. According to legend and one of his interviews , the future CEO overheard a schoolgirl on a train one day, saying she thought ossan were creepy and always giving lectures. At that moment, he decided to prove to the world that ossan can be cool, too—and a middle-aged empire was born! He rented himself out first, then began adding others after a few months. He doesn't just let in any middle-aged dude off the street, though.
He vets each candidate in multi-hour-long interviews. If he's satisfied, he tells them, "You really do look like an ossan! Nishimoto, if the ossan has a bad reaction to this, they're out. Only one in fifty applicants make the cut, which means everyone on the site is prime middle-aged man material. By , the service was getting around a thousand requests for ossan a year, and it continues to grow. Complaints are few—usually things like "the ossan was late" or other innocuous stuff.
Still, what are these thousand-plus customers doing with their ossan? Let's start with what they're not allowed to do:. Beyond that, customers are free to follow their imaginations.
