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Japanese fishermen start morning wake-up call service to help you get your lazy butt out of bed

Casey Baseel May 12, 2017
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Need to get up with the chickens? Leave it to the men who’re already awake and hauling in fish.

By this point, you’d think that technology would have advanced to the point where oversleeping is no longer problem for anyone in society. Between smartphone alarm settings, vibrating earphones to rouse you from slumber, and alarm clocks meant to bring you out of sleep with nostalgic memories of childhood, hopping out of bed at the necessary time should be a snap, right?

All of those methods are missing something, though: the human element. When you’re dealing with a machine, it’s all too easy to hit the snooze button or flip the off switch, then accidentally oversleep.

So what you really need is someone to wake you up, no matter how early you need to get out of bed. And you know who absolutely is going to be up before you, and thus in a position to do the job? A professional fisherman.

▼ “While you’re still dreaming, the fishermen’s battle has already begun.”

The just-launched Fisherman Call is billed as “The world’s first wake-up call service by fishermen.” On the service’s website, you’ll find a list of available fishermen, along with their photos, voice samples, and schedules, which have some of them getting up at 2 in the morning to make their way to the harbor and head for open water.

That crack-of-dawn schedule is key, because as shown in the Fisherman Call promotional video, the wake-up messages aren’t pre-recorded. The fishermen will actually be calling and talking to you live, quite possibly from the deck of their vessels.

“Good morning! Are you up?” asks the fisherman in the video, to which the user replies “Yes, thanks to you. Are you on your ship?” “Yeah, I got up at 3, so I’m already on the sea,” he replies, before adding “I caught a really big fish.”

Ironically for service with a nautical theme, the Fisherman Call website is a little hard to navigate. Stylized to look like a smartphone even when accessing it with a PC, you’ll need to place your cursor over the image shown on the on-screen “phone,” then scroll or drag down. Eventually you’ll come to the fisherman, and when you’ve picked out who you want a wakeup call from, you’ll need to check the box agreeing to the terms and click the “この漁師に起こしてもらう！” (“Have this fisherman wake me up!”) button.

From there, you’ll be taken to a request form in which to enter the hoped-for date and time of your call as well as your phone number. The form also says “If you’ve been having any worries, please tell us,” implying that if you’ve got something weighing on your spirit, the fishermen might give you some sea-sourced advice on how to deal with it.

The Fisherman Call website can be found here, and now has us wondering how the fishermen themselves manage to get up so early.

Related: Fisherman Call official website
Top image: Fisherman Call
Insert images: YouTube/FISHERMAN JAPAN, Fisherman Call
[ Read in Japanese ]

Odds are you’ll be up before Casey, but you can follow him on Twitter anyway.