Evaporated: Gone with the Gods
Dec 12, 2023 · 46 min · 16 segments
Jake and Shoko aren’t meeting the CEO of your average moving company. This is Miho Saita, the owner of a yonige–or, night moving–company. Night fleeing, to be precise. Subscribe to The Binge to get…
Jake AdelsteinHostMiho SaitaGuestOverlapping Co-HostHostSaita's DriverGuest
Manuals of suicide, love hotels, alibi services, and among these things are the weird but real nightmovers, or yonige.
Yo nige has probably existed since the first cars were sold in Japan, but became wildly popular in 1991 after a book about yo nige was published.
The book was later made into a manga and adapted into a comedy movie called Yonige-ya Honpo, or Yonige Main Office.
It's full of campy action sequences and follows professional nightmovers who help clients escape from debt.
We're Yonige's professionals.
We'll make
sure you survive.
In the movie, the night movers arrive in the middle of the night with a moving truck that has a lift that goes up to the second-story window.
They quickly load up a family of four and all their belongings on a conveyor belt and into the truck, then whisk them away into the night and to their new debt-free lives.
They are registered movers, but they work on hours and provide services far beyond what a typical mover offers.
I know that some of the shadier organizations will help clients get an entirely new identity.
In addition, we know from Goro-san and others that some night moving services are run by the Yakuza.
The word yonige isn't something that you're going to learn in your Japanese 101 textbook, but everyone here does know what it means.
Manuals of suicide, love hotels, alibi services, and among these things are the weird but real nightmovers, or yonige.
Yo nige has probably existed since the first cars were sold in Japan, but became wildly popular in 1991 after a book about yo nige was published.
The book was later made into a manga and adapted into a comedy movie called Yonige-ya Honpo, or Yonige Main Office.
It's full of campy action sequences and follows professional nightmovers who help clients escape from debt.
We're Yonige's professionals.
We'll make
sure you survive.
In the movie, the night movers arrive in the middle of the night with a moving truck that has a lift that goes up to the second-story window.
They quickly load up a family of four and all their belongings on a conveyor belt and into the truck, then whisk them away into the night and to their new debt-free lives.
They are registered movers, but they work on hours and provide services far beyond what a typical mover offers.
I know that some of the shadier organizations will help clients get an entirely new identity.
In addition, we know from Goro-san and others that some night moving services are run by the Yakuza.
The word yonige isn't something that you're going to learn in your Japanese 101 textbook, but everyone here does know what it means.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.
