Japanese fishermen offer morning wake up call service

The Japanese fishing organisation is offering a free service in which working fishermen will call users early in the morning to help wake them up and start their day.

Nobody likes to wake up at the crack of dawn, especially to a grating and irritating alarm buzz. But imagine getting a personal call from a friendly fisherman working off the Sanriku Coast who’s been up for hours and wants to wake you up with a more personal touch?

The service is called Fisherman’s Call and users (in Japan) can sign up for free before the end of May. All they have to do is fill in a quick questionnaire, pick their alarm times to get their call and they can even select one of many different fishermen to ring them. The service displays their pictures, voice samples, what time they start their shift and even displays what kind of fish they specialise in.

Clearly being a live conversation, the fisherman can’t spend ages on each call, but the chat will usually be a few lines back and forth about what time the fisherman started work and what fish he’s caught that morning. Certainly sounds a lot more interesting than beep, beep, beep. The idea is to make younger Japanese people aware of the fishing industry. Fisherman Japan, the team behind the project, is led by a group of young fishermen of the Sanriku region whose main aim is to make the industry look cool with youngsters.

Other ideas we’ve seen lately to make the morning rise less hellish are the Sunrise Pillow, which uses natural light for a softer wake up and the Thim ring, which wakes users up at set patterns just after the nod off (which can improve sleep). Is this the sort of service that could be applied to other industries and trades?