New Comfort For – and Profit From – Japan’s Lonely
By Yoree Koh
In Japan, the paradise of hospitality, there is a service for nearly everything, including the kind of companionship that often comes with neon lights and velvet booths. But for those lonesome souls who’d prefer a more homely type of company, there is a number for that too.
- Okakae Co.
- A home-cooked meal and a dinner companion for 8,000 yen.
Okakae Co., a Tokyo-based chauffeur company, launched July 1 a new service called “washokuya” where customers can rent someone, usually a woman, to cook a homemade meal for them, then stay for dinner. Three women currently staff the service. One is a middle-aged housewife, another a student in her 20s.
“We’ve recently become a society filled with many sad and lonely people. This is our attempt to alleviate some of that sadness; a simple service where people eat together and talk to one another,” Masami Morita, vice president of the company, told JRT in an interview.
Mr. Morita said it’s a homespun take that was influenced by “guchi-kikiyasan” — literally “listening to complaints” — a telephone service of sorts that people can call to vent about work, family and friends and has taken off in Japan recently.
It is the first service of its kind in Japan, according to the company, that carries hints of homecare nursing, therapy and private catering wrapped in one. It’s also one of several services the company is dabbling with as customer demands extend beyond driving requests. Customers wonder if the company can pick up dry cleaning, trim the garden and…cook dinner.
The fee for the home-cooking runs ¥8,000 ($98) for three hours and ¥500 for an additional 15 minutes. The service is currently only available in Tokyo and immediate outlying prefectures.
Mr. Morita said most clients so far have been elderly men, aged 50 to 70 years old, whose wives have already died. But he has also gotten business from some working women too busy to cook. Whether they’re tired of dining out, or have physical ailments that make grocery shopping difficult, clients are mostly craving a homemade dinner and someone to talk to, according to Mr. Morita.
One recent elderly client purchased the service on his birthday and requested his dinner companion to cook a meal reminiscent of the one his mother used to make for him every year, a spread of traditional Japanese simmered dishes and grilled fish.
The offering speaks to Japan’s changing demographics, creaking with a rapidly aging population and a younger generation opting to stay single longer. There are nearly 16 million single-member households in Japan, the first time the figure exceeds 30%, according to the 2010 census released by the Internal Affairs Ministry. The census also showed that the number of Japanese people aged 65 or older reached a record 29.3 million as of October of 2010, comprising about 23% of the country’s total population.
Update: Okakae Co. said it increased the fee for the “washokuya” service to ¥15,000 on July 10.
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