A 38-year-old Japanese man is charging 10 000 yen ($71) an hour to accompany customers and simply be present as a companion.

Before Shoji Morimoto, a Tokyo resident found his true calling, he worked at a publishing company and was often scolded for “doing nothing”. He told rapper.com:

I started thinking about what would happen if I offered customers the ability to ‘do nothing’ as a service.

People think that my ‘doing nothing’ is valuable because it is useful (to others) … but it’s okay to actually do nothing. People don’t need to be useful in any particular way.

Basically, I rent myself. My job is to be where my clients want me to be and do nothing in particular.

Morimoto told Reuters that he has spent the last four years on the job and has handled around 4 000 sessions.

Morimoto now has nearly a quarter million followers on Twitter, where he gets most of his clients. Roughly a quarter of them are repeat customers, with one hiring them 270 times.

Last week, Morimoto sat in front of Aruna Chida, a 27-year-old data analyst, dressed in a sari, chatting a little over tea and cake.

Chida wanted to wear the Indian dress in public, but she worried that it might embarrass her friends. So she turned to Morimoto for companionship.

The companionship business is now Morimoto’s only source of income, with which he supports his wife and child. Although he declined to reveal how much he earns, he said he sees about one or two customers a day. Before the pandemic, it was three or four a day.