Two years ago, The New Yorker has released an sensational article about the rental industry in Japan. Now it turned out that her key heroes were lying

In April 2018, an article by American writer Elif Batuman about the rental of relatives in Japan was published in The New Yorker. She said that there are agencies in the country whose employees play the role of someone else's relatives for money. You can hire a son or daughter to spend time with them; the bride to present her parents; the boss, so that the disgruntled client shouts at him; A lover, so that he apologizes to the deceived husband. Renting provides for meetings, conversations, joint entertainment, but very limited physical contact.

The article stated that agencies in relatives rented as a result of the 1980s economic boom, when the birth rate fell in Japan, and the number of divorces, single people and the elderly grew. In 1989, the president of the Japanese company, who conducted corporate trainings, Satsuki Ova began to offer older people to rent children and grandchildren - in return for the present, who had no desire or time to visit older relatives. A few years later, Ova had more than a hundred customers. Japanese journalists wrote about her business, fake relatives became heroes of literature and cinema.

The main source of information for the article was the owner of the Family Romance lease agency Yuichi Icia. He said that since 2009 he played the role of a husband for hundreds of women and once worked in 10 families at the same time. The article said that through the Family Romance one can conclude both one -time and long -term contract. The price depends on what you have to do. For example, sitting in a cafe with hiring costs $ 370, and organize a fake wedding with a dummy groom will cost 47 thousand dollars.

The article begins with a story about one of the customers of Family Romance - the elderly resident of Tokyo Kazisige Nisid. His wife died, and his daughter stopped communicating with him after a quarrel. He rented his wife and daughter, with whom he regularly spent time for several years and who ultimately convinced him to make peace with the real daughter. The story completes the text about a lonely mother named Reiko (her surname is not given in the article), who hired her father for her daughter Mana so that she would not be poisoned at school. Father - he turned out to be Yiichi Icia - played a role for 10 years. At the time of writing, 20-year-old Mana has not yet recognized the truth.

When I asked Reiko if she plans to tell Mane the truth someday, her eyes filled with tears. “No, I can never tell her this,” she said, and then began to laugh. “Sometimes I want [a man playing the role of a father named] Inaba-san married me,” she added through laughter and tears “I don’t know if I should tell me, but I'm also glad when he comes to us. These are short meetings, but they can make me very, very happy. Honestly, he is a very good person. Maybe you will see. ”

After the article by The New Yorker, a film about renting relatives in Japan was shown at the Cannes festival. But later the heroes of the article were convicted of lies

The New Yorker article attracted great attention. Other media began to talk about the rental of relatives in Japan (often using the same heroes), and director Werner Herzog shot a film about the Family Romance agency, his premiere was held at the Cannes Film Festival. At the end of 2018, the material Elif Batuman was in the list of the best texts of the year in English according to Medusa, in March 2019 he won the award of the American Society of magazines. And in mid-December 2020, The New Yorker added a large editorial note to the article, from which it followed that some of the information presented in the text is not true.

The note says that in 2019 the Japanese press convicted Family Romance in deception: one of the agency’s employees was introduced by his client in the documentary of the Japanese television channel NHK. After this exposure, The New Yorker began to check if there was a distortion of facts in the article of the magazine about Family Romance. The investigation lasted more than a year and showed that the key heroes of the material - Yiichi Icei, Casusige Nisid and Reiko Simad - were lied by Elif Batuman and the fact of The New Yorker, who called the heroes of her articles and asked if the details of their biography were correctly described in the text.

The New Yorker said that the evidence collected allow us to assume that Nisida, Simad and Issi did not call the author of the article and fact the fact of their real complete names and that each of them is marriage, although Nisida called himself a widower, Simada-a diluted mother-single, and Isi said that Kholost. Moreover, Isi, apparently, is married to Simad.

The New Yorker contacted all three heroes. Nisida and Simada admitted that they lied about their names in order to maintain confidentiality. But the rest of their stories are true, they insisted. Isi assured that he only told the truth. He admitted that Simad and her family enjoy his support, but did not give a clear answer to the question whether they were married.

Despite the lies of the heroes, The New Yorker decided not to recall the article. The editors explained this by the fact that the phenomenon of Japanese companies that provide relatives for rent “well documented”, and the author of the material and facts performed their work in good faith. “We are still confident in the values ​​of [article] as a study of the idea of ​​a family in Japan and in a broader sense. But our conclusions about Nisida, Shimad and Isiah ... they undermine confidence in what they told us, ”the note says.

The Washington Post Mediacritic praised The New Yorker for the investigation - but reproached for conclusion from it

The Mediacritic The Washington Post Eric Wemple criticized the decision of The New Yorker. “There is no more article. It tells stories about the unfortunate and desperate people, who, as it turns out, are not so unhappy and desperate. They are simply unreliable and false. It is for such situations that journalism invented a refutation ... If you leave the article untouched with a huge note of the editor at the top, this will not help. " WEMPL also brought a statement by the American Society of publishers of magazines, from which it follows that the association does not plan to recall the reward for the article - and condemned it too.

In turn, the author of the American publication The New Republic Ryu Spate (he himself from Japan) noticed that the text of The New Yorker describes the lease of relatives as something that has long been included in Japanese society, but does not allow to evaluate its real scales. Spate also complained about the shortcomings of the process of checking the facts in the journalist: “He is especially vulnerable to the author or source confidence in the author or source. Factor can do little if someone intends to lie, especially when the bets are so low (lies ... about the sad life of the Japanese is not equal to lies, say, about weapons of mass defeat and Iraq). ”

Olga Korelina