The archive · Small Business & Money · Product decision · 2009–2020
Family Romance: renting out fake fathers, spouses and friends becomes a Tokyo business
Actor Ishii Yuichi rented himself out as a fake father for one interview — then built Family Romance, a 1,200-actor agency filling missing family roles.
Family Romance
What it had to solve
In 2009 Tokyo, actor Ishii Yuichi's single-mother friend was denied kindergarten admission for her 4-year-old son because the family looked incomplete; Ishii posed as the boy's father at the interview and realized there was a market for renting family roles.
How it works
In 2009, Tokyo actor Ishii Yuichi helped a single-mother friend whose 4-year-old son had been denied a kindergarten admission interview because the family was seen as incomplete — he posed as the boy's father for the meeting. The favor worked so well that he founded Family Romance, an agency that rents out actors to fill missing roles in people's lives.
Named after Freud's 'family romance' concept, the company built a roster that reached about 1,200 actors by 2019. Assignments range from stand-in fathers at weddings and fake grooms in staged ceremonies to long-running roles: Ishii himself has acted as one girl's father for years, earning about ¥5,000 an hour, with orders specifying temperament and appearance and strict rules banning intimacy.
Prices start around ¥8,000, and the service spread across Japan alongside imitators — rental sisters, rental uncles and funeral guests. Ishii's justification is blunt: 'It's not a good thing that this kind of family substitute service exists, but it's needed in our society.'
By 2019 the business was famous enough that Werner Herzog made Family Romance, LLC, a feature starring the real founder. What began as one favor for a friend became the emblem of Japan's rental-services economy.
Why it lands
- It reframed a social stigma — single-parent families — as a fixable service problem, filling gaps the system left.
- Ishii had already done the exact job himself, so the pitch was a story he had lived, not a theory.
- Strict rules and specified roles made the service feel safe and professional, like any agency.
- Long-running roles created loyalty: the fake father became a fixture in a child's life, not a one-off gig.
- The strangeness itself was marketing — coverage in The New Yorker, The Atlantic and Herzog's film spread the idea worldwide.
What it did
The agency became the most famous name in Japan's rental-services wave, with assignments spanning fake fathers, spouses, wedding guests and long-running family roles. The idea drew coverage in The New Yorker and The Atlantic, and Werner Herzog made a 2019 feature film, Family Romance, LLC, starring the real founder.
What you can take
A service doesn't have to fix a broken system — it can fill the gap until society catches up. Find a role people can't play, rent people to play it, and the emotional need does the marketing.
Since then
Family Romance became the most famous name in Japan's rental-services wave, with coverage in The New Yorker and The Atlantic and a 2019 Werner Herzog feature, Family Romance, LLC, that premiered at Cannes and cast the real founder as himself. The category kept growing with competitors offering rental sisters, uncles and funeral guests, and Ishii continued long-running roles — including the girl who has known him as her father since 2009. 'I believe that the world is always unfair, and my business exists because of that unfairness,' he said.
Sources
- Rent-A-Family: The Japanese Industry Reimagining What Family Means
- On the phone to Werner Herzog: 'A deep existential solitude is coming at us'
- 'I'm a fake father to a girl who doesn't know.'
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