'People hire me to be their friend for £75 - but there's one request I always refuse'

A Japanese man who is a professional “friend,” renting himself out for about £75 every day has become a cult figure, inspiring a TV series and a comic book. But when globetrotting adventurer Drew Binsky hired Shoji Morimoto to “do nothing” with him, he made a rather shocking discovery.

Drew went to Tokyo to meet Shoji, and through an interpreter interviewed him about some of his strangest clients. The softly spoken 40-year-old told him that while he rarely turns down any customers’ requests, he was disturbed when a woman hired him to just watch her eating paper.

Shoji, popularly known as “the do nothing guy” makes around £60,000 a year from his unusual job – and says he manages to fit in an average of three or four clients a day. The work is wildly varied – sometimes it’s just a case of going to lunch with someone, but other customers have stranger requests. On one occasion he was hired to watch a wife search for her husband’s secret profile on internet dating sites.

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In his book, “Rental Person Who Does Nothing,” Shoji recalled: “She screamed (like in her DM) every 10 minutes or so. At one stage, she made a mistake with an app, clicking ‘Like’ for a man she wanted to skip through. She stared up at the ceiling and looked very upset.”

Shoji doesn’t speak English, but has sometimes been hired by British and American tourists who ask him to pretend to understand them. A few people have tried to follow in his footsteps.

Drew’s translator explains: “He's the first guy who started doing this and after that there were so many people who tried to do it like him, but he's the only ‘Do Nothing guy’ that earns money from the job."

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There are a few requests he regularly turns down. He refuses to have sex with his clients, and there’s another, less predictable, no-no: “I’ve turned down a number of requests to go to pop concerts too,” he says.

“I don’t know much about music, and most of the concerts I’ve been asked to go along to have been by artists I’ve never heard of.”

But overall, Shoji says he quite enjoys his work, writing “Do-nothing Rental gives me a similar kind of passive entertainment, even though, in this case, I’m the service provider rather than the service user.” He tells Drew that he hopes to continue working as a “Do Nothing Guy” for the rest of his life.

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There’s certainly no shortage of demand for his services. Drew explains: “In Japan there is this term called Hikikomori, which refers to people who withdraw from the world and isolate at home due to loneliness and social anxiety. For these people having someone like Shoji who gets paid to be your friend might seem like a solution.”

But Shoji himself seems painfully shy, and any introverted person who hired him might find themselves in for a very quiet few hours: “He's just a little awkward,” Drew says. “I can't believe he meets a thousand people a year and he doesn't have much of a personality at all.

“It’s just kind of shocking to me,” he added, “but that's just how it goes.”

Shoji makes no claims to be a social live wire: ““The client wants to do something, and I just go along. No deep commitment is expected and no personality required,” he says.