This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/upliftingnews by /u/mement0m0ri on 2025-08-06 15:29:58+00:00.
When a Japanese handyman contractor faced an oversaturated market, they turned to a pretty unusual solution: a ‘rent-a-grandma.’
With few other jobs available for women over 60 other than house cleaners, the company realized that for the same reason a person might want to hire a male handyman in his 60s during a homebuilding project, someone might want to hire a grandmother for a homemaking project.
Tokyo’s Client Partners started the OK! Obaachan (OK! Grandmother) service in 2011, and it’s become a hit.
“I never get bored,” 69-year old Taeko Kaji, one of the rent-a-grandmas, told the Australian ABC. “I get to go out and have these experiences and that’s why taking this job was the right decision for me.”
Client Partners allows customers to hire the services of guides and interpreters, but concern in Japanese society over run-of-the-mill, big city loneliness gave the company the idea to start renting friends, ‘aunts,’ and now even grandmothers.
“Some people may never have had a mother in the first place,” Client Partners chief executive Ms. Ruri Kanazawa told the ABC. “Our grandmother staff members, who cook for the guests and act like a mother to them, help provide the motherly warmth they need.”
Along with loneliness the service may be seen as addressing another societal challenge in Japan: the size of the geriatric population. As big as anywhere else on Earth, there are fewer and fewer working-age Japanese to support the growing number of pensioners. Working can provide better economic security, but many jobs become unavailable, especially women, to those in their golden years.
In traditional societies, the elders take on just such roles: as wisdom-holders, storytellers, adjudicators, and teachers. Client Services’ grandmother contractors very much fulfil that position—for a healthy hourly wage of around $55.
For years, ABC News reports, Japanese society saw women work until marriage, then quit their jobs, stay home to raise the kids until they enter school, then put one foot back in the job market through contract or part-time work. This generation of women, if they were married, would be secured in retirement through their husbands’ pension plans.
This contributed in no small part to the incredible economic boom experienced during the second half of the 20th century, but some women, who may have never been married, or whose husbands died young, face an extreme lack of available work.
Sharing their love and life experience with a young family is clearly an opportunity many are happy to have and happy to do.