Rent-a-Family: The Commodification of Kinship Ties

Family Romance is a company that offers family member rentals in Japan. It is a small scale service that receives around “250 requests a month”: what I am describing is not a mainstream trend.[1] However, the emergence of this service signals a shift in the culture—this is what I will attempt to comprehend in the article.

The Chrysanthemum and the Sword by celebrated anthropologist Ruth Benedict gives us descriptions of family life in Japan in the early-mid 20th century. The Japanese family described in the study is in a hierarchical structure, and generation, gender, and primogeniture determines one’s position in the hierarchy. Being in a position of authority does not give one the prerogative to exercise power arbitrarily. Individual interest is subsumed under the needs of the family, and with authority comes the burden of increased responsibility. Within the traditional three generation Japanese family, family solidarity is reinforced by mutual obligations of debt.[2]

The Japanese family has gone through a transformation. The 2018 Palme d’Or winning film Shoplifters by Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda is an evocative illustration of the contemporary Japanese family. Kore-eda is a filmmaker known for his family dramas, and this latest film portrays an unconventional family. The film seems to center on a loving, three-generation Japanese family: Osamu and Nobuyo play the husband and wife in precarious jobs; Aki and Shota are the older daughter and younger son; finally, there is Hatsue, the old matriarch whose pension and home contributes to the whole family’s survival. As the film reaches its conclusion we realize that these people are strangers and unconnected by biological ties—this “family” is a performance put on by a band of misfits collected together for survival.

Kore-eda’s comments on his film are crucial for the analysis:

“The traditional concept of family was already being dismantled or destroyed in Japan … In ‘Shoplifters,’ I was looking at three generations living together, because that’s typically what you’d find in a Japanese household. But I wanted to play with that, and show that even within those terms the nuclear family is undergoing a permanent change.’  

“He remembered back to 2002 … ‘At that time, all the kids we saw were living in close proximity to their grandma or grandpa or both, and you could hear it in their vocabulary … [But] that has ceased to be the case. More elderly people are living alone. It’s very rare these days to see a family where the children have that kind of close contact with their grandparents, or live in traditional family structures.’ ”[3]

Between The Chrysanthemum and the Sword and the Shoplifters the Japanese family has undergone a mutation, and Family Romance fills in Japanese needs in response.[4] However, to deepen the analysis, we need an understanding of the overarching neo-liberal political economy in Japan.

Neo-liberalism, as anthropologist David Harvey writes, “is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade”.[5] In the labour market, neoliberal ideology is articulated in the form of labour market flexibility, leading to the dismantling of previous social institutions that limit flexibility (like unions), replacing traditional labour arrangements with short-term contracts and other flexible labour arrangements. The contemporary labour landscape supplies us with ample examples, with the gig economy and the precariats who populate it.[6] According to Harvey, neo-liberal ideology also operates under the presumption “that market and market signals can best determine all allocative decisions...” which is “to presume that everything in principle be treated as a commodity”—the logics of the markets expand to construct fictional commodities.[7]

We have here the two key pieces for understanding Family Romance. Neo-liberal ideology permits the understanding of ‘family’ as a commodity, something to be bought and sold in the market, and, according to the founder of the company, Family Romance draws on a flexible labour force of “about 2,000 employees” who are housewives, underemployed workers, salarymen, and pensioners to provide their service on-demand, leading to the uber-ification of the family.
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It is not only in Japan that traditional, family structures are transforming, and all throughout the world ties of intimacy are purchased—variants of Family Romance may spring up all over the world to fill in regional desires. What happens to the family? I suggest two hyperbolic images of the past and the potential future as a way of conclusion: The family, the traditional site of social solidarity, a lifelong, inescapable commitment, is transformed into a performance by individuals—this new family is a flexible arrangement that is bought and sold in the market as a commodity.
 


[1] http://family-romance.com/

[2] Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture. (Boston: Mariner Books.)

[3] https://deadline.com/2018/05/shoplifters-hirokazu-kore-eda-palme-dor-cannes-video-interview-1202394721/.

[4] The origins of Family Romance: the founder had a friend who was a single mother and wanted to take her daughter to a private kindergarten; due to Japanese stigmas against single mothers he had to act as the father.

[5] David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: New York, 2005), 2.

[6] While I analyze this cultural phenomena through the neo-liberal political economy and neo-liberal ideology, I do not mean to suggest that this is the only reason for the gig economy. Technological disruptions have also transformed the labour market, as Klaus Schwab describes in his The Fourth Industrial Revolution.

[7] David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: New York, 2005), 165.