Ikemeso Danshi: Tokyo rents out 'handsome weeping boys' to make offices cry

In the fall of 2015, entrepreneur Hiroki Terai launched Ikemeso Danshi ('handsome weeping boys'), a Tokyo company that dispatches attractive young men to offices to lead group crying sessions. Terai had spent years running cathartic divorce ceremonies and rui-katsu ('tear-seeking') events, and he wanted to bring the same release to workplaces where showing emotion is treated as weakness.

A session costs about 7,900 yen: the weeping boy shows short tearjerker films, reads sad stories or plays melancholy music, cries along with the room, then moves through the office wiping each person's tears with a handkerchief. Clients pick from six types — the younger brother, the Showa-era mature face, Mr Tokyo, the intellectual, the rebel and the sweet dentist — and the technique is grounded in research on empathetic tears by Toho University professor emeritus Hideo Arita.

By the end of 2015, more than 25 offices had used the service, and client companies reported feeling 'refreshed' after crying together. 'In Japan, showing too much emotion can lead to poor relationships with others,' Terai said; his answer was to make crying a scheduled, collective office ritual instead of a private shame.

A decade later, Ikemeso Danshi still operates with a roster of about 20 crying conveners, and the service has become the standard media example of Japan's rental-services economy — proof that a strange, small idea can become a durable business.