How the New Yorker Fell into the “Weird Japan” Trap

It’s a crazy story that falls squarely into the Weird Japan genre, showcasing an extreme form of alienation, in which people are compelled to hire perfect strangers to stand in for their closest relatives. Single women hire husbands to appease their “marriage-obsessed” parents. The elderly recruit grandchildren to stave off loneliness. Adulterous wives pay men to stand in as their lovers to apologize to their wrathful husbands. Fakeries abound: fake bosses, fake weddings, fake families. Many of these stories are sourced to Yuichi Ishii, the founder and proprietor of Family Romance, who says he has played a fake husband to a hundred women and organized two to three fake weddings a year. The picture of Japan that emerges is steeped in stereotypes of a childlike country that is so superficial, so emotionally repressed, so cowed by an overbearing society that its people would rather outsource the work of confronting their parents or reaching out to an estranged daughter—the work of being a human being.

The article concludes with a wild story about Reiko, a single mother who has rented a part-time father for her daughter. For nine years, this girl has believed that this fake father, Inaba, is her real one. The deception has done wonders for the girl’s well-being, and Reiko admits that she sometimes wishes Inaba would actually marry her. As Batuman is interviewing Reiko in a Tokyo tearoom, drinking “sweetened yuzu infusions,” Inaba walks in. “Inaba-san!” Reiko cries. Ah, but it turns out that Inaba is really Yuichi Ishii! “Have you wondered about Inaba-san’s real name, and what he does in the rest of his life?” Batuman asks Reiko. No, she hasn’t. The story takes a surreally dramatic turn, as Batuman tries to wrap her mind around these two people who behave like a couple but aren’t a couple. “Her eyes met mine, and I beamed back at her,” Batuman writes. “I wasn’t faking—it was a real smile. But what was I smiling at?”

A con, as it turns out. The trouble began a year after the article was published, when a Japanese magazine reported that an employee of Family Romance had pretended to be a client of the company in a documentary produced by the giant Japanese broadcaster NHK. NHK confirmed that Ishii had told his staffers to carry out the ruse. The New Yorker then began its own investigation, culminating in the stunning admissions that were published this week: that “Kazushige Nishida,” the lonely widower, was in fact married and did not provide his real name; that “Reiko Shimada,” the lonely single mother, was in fact married and did not provide her real name; and that, craziest of all, Reiko and Yuichi Ishii are married to each other. Despite these elaborate deceptions, they all insisted that their stories were otherwise true.

This is real hall-of-mirrors stuff, to the point that it is impossible to fully separate fact from fiction. (To read Batuman’s account of her meeting Reiko and Yuichi with the new knowledge that they are performing a high-wire subterfuge is so disorienting that it almost makes one queasy.) What we know is that the New Yorker article and others like it spurred immense interest in the alleged family-rental craze. NHK produced its documentary. Werner Herzog made a movie about Yuichi Ishii that premiered at Cannes and featured Ishii playing a fake father to a girl. Conan O’Brien did a painful, Borat-like bit where he showed up at Ishii’s office and requested a fake family.

from Hacker News https://ift.tt/3mqFVkD