Before your brain goes straight to Kabukicho: relax. This is not a red-light district story, and these services aren’t selling anything physical. Rental boyfriend / rental girlfriend agencies in Japan are basically date companion services. You book someone to spend time with you in public, under clear rules, and the ‘role’ is usually what it says on the label: boyfriend, girlfriend, or just someone to hang out with.
If you’ve been online long enough, you’ve probably seen this concept float by already, either through Vice-era coverage or a streamer trying it out as content. It gets filed under ‘weird Japan’, but the reality is way more normal: a lot of people book these dates because they don’t want to do something alone, their original plus-one bailed, they’re travelling and want someone to show them around, or they just want a low-pressure day where they can talk and feel a bit less in their own head. Think of it as renting company, not true romance – that latter part is mostly atmosphere.
What many don’t realise is that Japan has been ‘renting people’ for a while. The broader rental-companion / stand-in world goes back to the early 1990s, and it’s since grown into a full system of ‘borrowed connection’ services. You can rent a friend, a grandma, and even a handsome guy to cry with you. The boyfriend/girlfriend version is for some reason just the most meme-able branch of that tree – one that started getting more publicly visible in the early 2010s, when this style of dispatch services began getting covered more in not just manga and TV programmes, but foreign films and web projects too.
Culturally, it makes sense in a way that’s easy to miss from the outside. Japan’s whole ‘keep it together in public’ etiquette (the honne meaning the true self and tatemae meaning the face you show the world) means a lot of people aren’t used to dumping their real feelings on friends. Meanwhile, mental health support can still feel stigmatised, or simply not that accessible in the form people actually want (like talk therapy).
So a role-based setup can, weirdly enough, make it easier to open up: you’re not ‘being a burden’, you’re not risking a friendship, and the expectations are already set. You’re paying for someone to show up, listen and treat your time like it matters, which is why so many people use these services. Budget-wise, you’re usually looking at ¥3,000–¥6,000 per hour (often with a minimum booking), and longer plans can easily push past ¥20,000 once you add travel and date costs.
Here are four rental partner agencies to get you started in Tokyo.
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