China News Service, September 6. According to a report by Reuters on the 6th, Shoji Morimoto, 38, of Japan has a special job - he rents himself out.
"My job is to go wherever the client asks me to go." His business is popular with many people online, and he has nearly 250,000 followers on Twitter, an overseas social media platform.
According to reports, Morimoto charges 10,000 yen (about 493 yuan) for every hour he accompanies customers.
In the past four years, he has carried out about 4,000 companionships.
"Basically, I rented myself out. My job was to go wherever the client wanted me to go and do nothing," Morimoto told Reuters.
According to Morimoto, most of his clients found him on Twitter.
About a quarter of his clients are repeat customers, some of whom have hired him 270 times.
Morimoto said that since the launch of the "Rent Yourself" service, he has encountered all kinds of customers renting him for various reasons, and the work content is very diverse.
For example, he went to the park with a person who wanted to play on a seesaw, and he smiled and waved at a stranger who wanted to say goodbye through the car window.
However, that doesn't mean Morimoto will do everything, such as he once turned down offers to move the refrigerator and go to a certain country.
Morimoto previously worked for a publishing company and was often accused of "doing nothing", according to reports.
But now he can support his family by "renting himself out".
Although Morimoto declined to disclose his income, he said he usually sees one to two clients a day, and before the Covid-19 pandemic, three to four clients a day.
"People tend to think my 'doing nothing' is valuable because it's useful [to other people]... It's actually okay to do nothing. People don't have to be useful in any particular way," Morimoto said.