Program aims to help new college graduates get ready for the start of grown-up working life, with voices ranging from anime-style to husky.

Nobody really likes waking up to the sound of an alarm, do they? Whether it’s coming from a dedicated alarm clock or your phone that you keep beside your bed, the whole point of an alarm is to wake you up when you’d rather be sleeping, often with an annoying beeping or buzzing that means your first emotion of the day is drowsy irritation.

Wouldn’t it be nicer to start your morning off with a kinder, more human touch? Think back to when you were a kid, and your mom would come in and rouse you with a gentle “Good morning.” Sure, maybe you didn’t jump out of bed bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, but you at least had a heartfelt reminder that there was someone in the world who was rooting for you go to out into the world and have a great day.

Unfortunately, that personal service is something we lose as we get older, either because we move away from home or simply because we reach an age where our moms feel we’re old enough to get up on our own. But this month, Japanese mobile phone service provider au is bringing that slice of blissful childhood back with its au Morning Call service, which is staffed by Japanese mothers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xj9UJDSJdnM#t=0m49s

It’s customary for recent college graduates to start working in April, which means that next month, after four years of taking it easy in Japan’s notoriously laid-back universities, a lot of 22-year-olds are going to have to start getting up early again. In a survey of recent graduates about to start their first adult job, au found that 80.8 percent were worried about being able to drag themselves out of bed and get to the office on time, with 67.3 percent also saying they need to practice getting on an earlier wake-up cycle in March.

So to help them, au has enlisted a team of “oka-chan” (“mommies”) for a five-day wake-up call program. The project’s website has profiles of the 10 moms participants can choose from. For example, Tomoe Fushimi, a 52-year-old inn proprietress from Fukuoka Prefecture, has already raised one daughter, and her voice is described as being “a regal, anime-like voice.”

Perhaps you’d prefer to be beckoned out of sleep by the “mildly husky yet slightly high-pitched” voice of 50-year-old Ikuyo Hamada of Hyogo Prefecture, a mother of two who’s billed as “the Kansai Region J-Soul Sister.”

Or, if experience is the critical factor in your wake-up needs, there’s 64-year-old “Mrs. Stoic,” Yamagata resident Hinata Fuyuno, the oldest member of the team, whose voice is soft and relaxed.

However, while a mother’s love may be limitless, her time isn’t, and so au’s corps of wake-up moms can’t call every sleepy youngster in Japan. 100 randomly chosen applicants will be selected to receive wake up calls, which can be requested for any time between 6:30 and 8:59 a.m. (applications can be made here between now and March 12). And remember, the mom morning call program only runs between March 19 and 23, after which you’ll have to get up by yourself like a big boy or girl, unless of course that group of Japanese fishermen reinstate their wake-up call service.

Source: au via PR Wire, IT Media
Top image: YouTube/au
Insert images: au

Follow Casey on Twitter, where he still thinks it’s crazy that his high school started classes at 7:30 a.m.