Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

Some clients’ apartments were chest-high in garbage because they were terrified of running into other people at the communal trash bin.

Others needed help filling out their wedding parties, including a bride who was supplied with two 27-year-olds posing as her bridesmaids.

And then there was the young woman who’d retreated to her bathroom after finding a single dead roach in her living room. After an emergency phone call, the time required to remove the offending object: less than a minute. Charge: $50.

Part handyman, part psychologist, Japan’s benriya, or “convenience-doers,” solve problems once easily handled by relatives, neighbors and friends. And business is thriving in this society beset by social fears, alienation and an apparent inability -- or unwillingness -- to perform many of life’s basic tasks.

Job requirements for benriya include discretion, patience and the moxie to do whatever it takes, without blinking an eye, bursting out laughing or worrying too much about scruples.

Even as they happily pocket often-hefty fees, however, some benriya reflect on the social changes that have fueled demand for their services. “Business is business,” said Kanji Sugimoto, head of the Project K benriya firm. “But it’s sad that Japanese find it so difficult to ask each other for even simple favors.”

Benriya are unlicensed, and most are men working alone -- an estimated 5,000 nationwide, including 1,000 or so in Tokyo. They advertise on handbills, in phone books, over the Internet and by word of mouth, and are another of Japan’s many unusual niche professions. These include wakaresaseya -- specialists in breaking up relationships -- and yonigeya, experts at crafting escapes for people heavily in debt and hoping to flee creditors.

Though every nation has its handymen, benriya perform far-wider-ranging tasks than most of their overseas counterparts. They’ve been featured in movies, television shows and comic books as the profession becomes a magnet for laid-off corporate warriors.

The bulk of most benriya’s business involves cleaning, moving furniture and fixing items around the house. While some customers are yuppies with more money than time, benriya say a surprising number of Japanese these days lack the confidence or know-how to do everyday chores.

“Compared to Americans, Japanese are far less independent or self-reliant,” said Yutaka Iwase, director of the Osaka-based Japan Benriya Assn. “In Japan, benriya do a lot that people really should do themselves.”

As the lives of young Japanese have become more divorced from nature, the tolerance for dirt and unusual smells has dropped sharply, bringing more calls to rid apartments of odors that sometimes seem largely rooted in the customer’s imagination.

But ordinary cleaning jobs aren’t always so ordinary. BS Planning benriya Ryuji Watanabe recalls cleaning an apartment after someone committed hara-kiri, or ritual disembowelment, a now-rare form of suicide. “I was called in six days after the death,” he said. The job wasn’t pleasant, and he won’t soon forget it, he said.

Many benriya also have firsthand experience with hikikomori -- the social breakdown and acute depression now on the rise in Japan. Tokyo-based ACT Service, which specializes in female clients, offers a combined house cleaning and psychological counseling package for those unable to cope, women who are fearful of even the slightest contact with neighbors.

“One apartment I just did had pickles in the fridge that expired in 1996,” said Project K’s Sugimoto. “There was an egg that looked like a fossil.”

Given the importance in Japan of saving face and avoiding confrontation, benriya also provide the social lubricant required to extricate a customer from a sticky situation, including saying no to a troublesome neighbor.

“They fill a real need in Japanese society,” said Motoo Murata, an independent analyst.

That can also include spying on lovers, supplying alibis, pretending to be the husband of a loan applicant or sitting in as the fiance for a gay or happily single client during parental visits.

Yutaka Manabe, head of Benriya Japan outside Tokyo, said he once earned $200 buying souvenirs at Tokyo Disneyland for a customer. He never asked why, but he suspects the woman was covering up for an affair with a supposed work trip to the Magic Kingdom.

A problem that might be dismissed with a laugh in the United States can be hugely embarrassing in formal Japan.

Many benriya have been called in to pose as wedding guests by brides or grooms loath to admit their side of the aisle is smaller. Manabe earned $450 pretending to be a groom’s university professor, going so far as to give a glowing speech about the young man’s nonexistent academic accomplishments.

“I don’t know why these people need to show off so much,” Sugimoto said.

Benriya also stand in for clients unwilling or too busy to attend funerals in a nation where business contacts are all expected to drop by and pay their respects. And they help people who feel guilty about not cleaning ancestral graves -- an important annual rite in Japan -- but not guilty enough to actually do it themselves.

Sometimes even hard-boiled benriya find themselves touched by their cameo appearances in people’s lives. Sugimoto recalled an elderly lady whose deceased husband had dreamed of climbing Mt. Fuji. Sugimoto brought along two photographs of the husband when he climbed the 12,388-foot peak on her behalf. One of them he buried at the summit, the other he turned in all directions so the husband’s spirit could enjoy the view.

“She thanked me in tears when I returned,” he said. “I was crying as well. I always think about that job when things aren’t going well.”

Katsuyoshi Ukon, a 23-year veteran benriya who is considered the father of the industry, was hired by a professor of Inuit studies seeking assurance that it was safe to get near the North Pole before he made a research trip. Ukon pocketed $15,000 after he trekked off to northern Canada and sent back a postcard to prove he’d been there.

Pricing such jobs can be tricky. Some benriya, including Manabe, are quite upfront about their methodology: Size up the customers quickly and take them for all they’re worth. If they balk at the first price, he said, arrange a quick “discount.”

Others follow a more traditional approach. Tokyo benriya school director Tsuneo Suzuki advises his students to charge $40 an hour plus the cost of materials in order to remove the guesswork and encourage repeat business.

Competition among benriya can be tough and the turnover high. In recent years, more unemployed white-collar workers have entered the field because it has low start-up costs and requires no special skills.

Those good at it are rewarded financially, in addition to being their own boss and deciding whom to work with. Manabe says he earns $160,000 a year, admittedly the high end for the profession, a figure he drops in conversation when he wants to put arrogant customers in their place.

Though the modern benriya industry is only a couple of decades old, born of a realization in the late 1970s that richer Japanese would pay someone to handle life’s little irritants, its roots span centuries. Volunteer firemen of the 1603-1867 Edo period would do odd jobs between blazes, even as wandering merchants performed oddball tasks on behalf of their best customers.

School director Suzuki hopes to bring order to the industry with his academy, a nationwide franchise system and branded advertising campaign. “Moving furniture, pet care, locks and keys, gardening,” reads the syllabus for the school’s two-week course, attended mostly by middle-aged men.

“I’m not very confident working with my hands, but I’m trying my best,” student Isao Sakamoto, 45, a former salesman, said at a workshop piled high with ladders, toilet parts, pliers and kerosene containers.

Manabe, however, finds the whole idea of a benriya school a bit absurd. You either have it or you don’t, the self-made businessman said.

One course not taught in benriya school is how to handle lonely people. Ukon, the longtime benriya, had one job sleeping beside an elderly woman who lived alone and was racked with anxiety. The next day she told him that just having someone in the room had given her the best night of sleep in years.

“People pay me to eat out with them or sit at home together,” Ukon said, including one man who once gave him $8,000 just to listen to him talk about his life. “It really reflects the emptiness of society.”

Clients often show benriya a side of themselves they won’t reveal to friends or family, in part because they’re more comfortable dealing with a stranger and in part because of Japan’s complex system of social obligations.

It’s customary to give a gift to anyone who has done you a sizable favor, a gesture that must then be reciprocated, creating a cycle that can last a lifetime or longer, if the next generation is drawn in. Paying once, even if it’s expensive, can be a financial and emotional bargain.

“In Japanese culture, we’re supposed to send summer and winter gifts to people who help us out, which is an incredible pain,” said Hisae Miura, a 55-year-old Tokyo homemaker and benriya customer. “I’d much rather just pay.”

Japan’s demographic shift has also fueled business opportunities. “With the rapid aging of society, some people don’t even have someone to help them change a lightbulb,” said Yuki Sekine, head of Tokyo’s Super Benriya Plus.

He’s taken older people to the hospital, helped them shop and changed diapers for elderly men too embarrassed to use female nurses.

While benriya do a lot of manual labor, they’re also called on to use their gray matter. Masao Tanaka, head of the L.L.K. benriya firm in Shizuoka, received $400 a month doing homework for a man taking a computer course, while Manabe made $1,800 writing a philosophy thesis for a student at one of the nation’s most prestigious universities. “It received top marks,” he added.

Many benriya say there are certain jobs they won’t take. These include recruiting customers for the sex trade, transporting stolen goods, dumping illegal waste, collecting loans, importing drugs, beating up people, retrieving “something” from a coin locker and kidnapping children in custody battles.

“If the client won’t meet us in person,” said Makoto Takamori, head of Osaka-based Benriya Sakai, “there’s a high probability it’s illegal.”

Sometimes, however, benriya are deep into a job before realizing it’s dicey. Tokyo benriya Masao Ueda was asked last year to help dispose of some appliances. When he got to the client’s home, the elderly gentleman changed his story and said he had to move a large Buddha statue in a sleeping bag.

“I thought it was rather strange because the Buddha was limp, and it kept bending,” he said. “Then its head hit the stairs, making a funny noise.”

Ueda subsequently alerted police, who found the man’s dead wife in the sleeping bag and booked him for murder. “I don’t want another experience like that,” Ueda said.

Though benriya say they try to help people with anything that isn’t illegal, even that has its limits. A woman whose husband and child were away once tried to seduce Sugimoto.

“I’ll go as far as pretending to be a boyfriend,” he said. “But there’s no way you’re going to get me into a sexual relationship.”

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Rie Sasaki in The Times’ Tokyo Bureau contributed to this report.