Japan’s loneliness industry gives an early warning to the world

In a city that never stops moving, people are paying someone to stay still with them, to simply hold them. Tokyo’s cuddle-for-hire services have been running since 2012 and demand keeps climbing. There is no sex involved. Just arms. Just the terrible, basic need to be touched by another human being.

Some inhabitants have become so lonely that they can visit a “cuddle café” for a fee. This proves especially popular in the electronics districts. Besides a hug, you can get several other options that don’t just involve embracing. Someone can lightly pat you on the back for 20 minutes, or you can lie with your head on a woman’s or man’s lap for a while.

Then a stranger can rest their hand on your arm for three minutes, or you can stare into someone’s eyes for three minutes. All for a hefty fee, of course.

One suspects that the next generation, Generation Alpha, who are growing up with more technology than all humanity before them, will fall into a type of world-weariness because physical contact will decrease.

To ward off the loneliness in Tokyo, there exist “hugging chairs” in which you sit and they simulate hugs. They are called anti-loneliness chairs (shaped like large dolls with arms) and are marketed for older people or those feeling isolated.

Do you want to receive a bit of love from animals? “Bunny-hug cafés” exist for you, where you can hold a rabbit while having a drink. Because it’s too lonely at home and the rooms remain cold.

The effect of being solitary has increased to such an extent in Japan that on 12 February 2021, the government appointed Tetsushi Sakamoto as the minister of loneliness.

The longing for human presence has spawned an entire industry of substitution. The columnist Chris Roper once wrote in the Financial Mail about Japanese children who are too busy to visit their grandparents in retirement homes, so they simply hire actors to go in their place. The elderly are apparently comfortable with it and enjoy the visits, pretending the strangers are their real children. The other residents enjoy the younger company too.

The BBC tells the story of Asako, who hired a man named Takashi to play the role of father to her daughter, Megumi. At the time of the 2018 report, this arrangement had already lasted 10 years.

The BBC noted that Asako had no plans to end it and would continue hiring him indefinitely, even if it meant sinking ever deeper into a world of fantasy and deception.

There exists an entire rent-a-family-member industry in Japan, where you can hire an actor to stand in as your father, your son, your friend. Someone warm. Someone who shows up.

Around this trend, a series of novel words, a lexicon for the solitary people, has emerged. The hikikomori or extreme social isolation phenomenon occurs when teenagers and young people refuse to socialise at all. They stay with their parents.

Some of these teenagers function on a spectrum, but most fear life outside too much. Their escape lies in technology. Certain young people remain in isolation for years, even up to a decade. If you no longer want to go to school, the word is futōkō. The algebra of fear.

Incidentally, although the term for the hikikomori phenomenon originates from Japan, this behaviour is increasing in countries like the US, Germany, Spain and China. This journalist has two highly functional friends with children who refuse to leave their rooms. Both are in their mid-20s. They have been in therapy, but that, too, has become scary.

Then there are the dying. The increase in deaths that go unnoticed for years or months carries the name kodokushi. It means the lonely death.

Japan’s population has largely aged and, with that, countless people have become socially isolated for several reasons. The Guardian writes about someone in Japan who realised she no longer saw a neighbour on her balcony. When people went to her flat, they discovered she had died five months earlier.

Nearly 50,000 elderly people in Japan died alone at home in the first three months of 2025. Some of them die and nobody checks on them for years. By the time they are found, they are mere skeletons with clothes folded around the bones.

I knew a man from communal Sunday afternoon drinks at Café Manhattan in Green Point. He had just finished an MBA; I suspect he was about 45. He didn’t pitch up for a while and nobody took any notice.

A while later a friend told me he had been found dead in his flat in Bellville, a month after his death.

He was alcohol-dependent and had lost his job and many friends. Mike lay dead, unloved, unmissed, de­caying, for 31 days, in Cape Town, a city with nearly five million inhabitants.

I have a friend, also in Cape Town; she is 85. She sorely misses the company of people, many of whom have died of old age. She told me she often visits one of the many tidal pools around the city. There, she tells people she’s 90 and swims towards them, asking them to help her out of the water: just to feel the touch of another human being. Alone in a city pulsating with life.

Ever heard of jōhatsu? About 87,000 people disappeared in Japan in 2019. Gone. Poof! This still happens. Although some causes relate to health (dementia accounts for nearly 20% of cases), others disappear deliberately.

They might have lost their job, which is hugely shameful in Ja­­pan. The Japanese word jōhatsu refers to evaporation: you vanish without leaving any trace.

You have vaporised. This doesn’t just happen with individuals; entire families have disappeared without a trace. No one ever hears from them again.

One of the saddest professions exists in Japan. Its practitioners call themselves “tear sommeliers”. To cry in public in that country remains taboo.

Psychologists, however, believe in the power of tears and the positive psychological effect they have on you. Now people can burst into tears at home to their heart’s content, and someone comes to gently wipe their tears from their cheeks with tissues. Usually a nice-looking young man.

These sommeliers of sadness choose forlorn music and the mood becomes dark and sorrowful. Then the drops of salt-grief roll. They also offer collective sobbing in groups. The Atlantic writes: “The audience started sniffling well before the end of the first ­video, a Thai life-insurance commercial titled Silence of Love, which revolves around a teenage girl and her deaf father.

“By the advert’s conclusion, the sniffling had given way to open weeping. Over the next 40 minutes, as a series of ever sadder selections played, animated shorts, movie clips, YouTube memorials for pet cats, the sobs only grew louder.”

This may all sound eccentric and quietly dispiriting. It’s like stepping into the hermetic, fluorescent dreamworld of Lost in Translation, where Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) drifts through the glass corridors of the Park Hyatt Tokyo in a state of beautiful, aching suspension.

She is surrounded by 10 million people and touched by none of them. The city hums beneath her window, luminous and impenetrable, and she floats above it all like a ghost who hasn’t yet realised she’s died.

There is the suffocating awareness that connection has become structurally impossible: that loneliness in this context is not a personal failing but an architectural fact, baked into the gleaming surfaces and the bowing formalities and the vending machines that talk to you because nothing else will.

Feel like a meal without interacting with a real waiter? Tokyo is your epicurean nirvana. A few eateries in Tokyo already exist where robots serve you.

How does food taste when no human interaction occurs? How will the robot tell you with relish how delicious the dish of the day tastes, because the owner finely chopped fresh herbs from his garden into the soup?

Technological progress proves inevitable, and humanity’s withering psyche under the burden of cold steel and blue lights that flicker will follow suit.

In the film Ex Machina, which takes place on a remote secluded research compound, there exists a robot named Ava (Alicia Vikander). She’s sexy and defiant, and she flirts with a programmer, Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), who develops sexual and emotional feelings for her.

Ava seduces him; he falls for her. One day she climbs into the helicopter that Caleb intended for himself, to take him back home. He looks longingly at her and remains behind against his will to live alone and desolate in the wilderness.

She flies away and arrives in a big city, where she effortlessly blends in with the population… DM

This story first appeared in our weekly DM168 newspaper, available countrywide for R35.