In Japan, being a token westerner is big business

About ten years ago I was interviewed in Tokyo for a job as a fake Catholic priest, performing wedding ceremonies for Japanese couples who wanted the aesthetics of a Christian service without all the hassle of actually being Christian. In a room cluttered with tacky plastic religious paraphernalia I watched a training video of the company’s ‘top man’, an American Tom Cruise-lookalike in a cassock, ‘marrying’ a young couple. I was offered the job and it paid well but, fearing I might fluff my lines, collapse into giggles or, worst of all, come face to face with an ex-girlfriend approaching down the aisle, I turned it down.

That was the closest I ever came to accepting a ‘white monkey job’, a term used in Japan and China for a position that requires little or no skill and no qualifications at all, apart from the essential one of being a westerner. White monkey jobs range from modelling and acting (for people who wouldn’t be asked to model or act anywhere else) to being a fake company spokesperson. White men and women can even be employed as office staff who have no actual duties but simply lend the working environment a more sophisticated international ambience.

The phenomenon of white monkey work has been around for decades. In Japan in the 1970s and 1980s, when the economy exploded, traditional business etiquette began to decline and the marketing potential of foreigners became apparent (the ‘fairytale’ wedding of Charles and Diana is believed to have given fake Christian weddings a huge boost). Angus Waycott, in his memoir Paper Doors, confesses how he helped pay the bills in his early days in Tokyo by working as a catwalk model even though he was a grey-haired middle-aged man.