I could do that!

You've seen the memes that say, "The perfect sandwich (or mate, or car, or cell phone, whatever) doesn't exis....." and then they show you a picture of perfection in sandwich form...

Well, as a happy retiree, I am not looking for another job, but if I were....I would do like Shoji Morimoto is doing.

Shoji, 38, lives and "works" in Tokyo, getting paid pretty well to do pretty much nothing. To be specific, he charges 10,000 yen ($71) for bookings to go places with clients and just be a boon companion.

"Basically, I rent myself out. My job is to be wherever my clients want me to be and to do nothing in particular," is how Morimoto says it. He points out that ove the last four years, he has been a companion 4,000 times.  That's $284,000 all told, or $71,000 a year - righteous bucks for no real work at all.

I know Jared Kushner makes more than that for doing nothing, but it's all in whom you know.

Morimoto gets most of his clients from Twitter, where he almost has a quarter of a million followers. Some of his business is from repeat customers. One person has hired him 70 times.

One time, he went to a park to totter back and forth on a see-saw with someone who needed someone on the other end. One time, he went to a train station to give a send-off to a stranger who wanted a proper goodbye.

And there are limits to doing nothing, including moving a refrigerator (good idea! I messed up my back for four months doing that!) and going to Cambodia. Also, he strictly nixes any work of a sexual nature.

We do-nothings are nothing without our standards!

Recently, the job involved sitting with Aruna Chida, who is a data analyst. She wanted to wear her traditional Indian sari out in public but was afraid her friends would be embarrassed, so for $71, she had tea and cake with Morimoto. 

"With my friends I feel I have to entertain them, but with the rental-guy (Morimoto) I don't feel the need to be chatty," she said.

In Morimito's job history is a job where he worked at a publishing company and kept getting hollered at for doing nothing, so..."I started wondering what would happen if I provided my ability to 'do nothing' as a service to clients," he says.

Morimoto supports a wife and child with this job and averages one or two clients a day, down from three or four pre-pandemic, but so is everything else.

"People tend to think that my 'doing nothing' is valuable because it is useful (for others) ... But it's fine to really not do anything. People do not have to be useful in any specific way." - Shoji Morimoto