In February, Rent-a-Girlfriend manga creator Reiji Miyajima opened up a crowdfunding page to huge success for the series to celebrate the manga’s 5th anniversary and the second season of the TV anime – which has since begun and is streaming now on Crunchyroll – to pay for an advertisement inside Tokyo’s Shibuya Station, the second most trafficked train station in the world. 

The huge success saw the crowdfunding campaign reach its 6 million yen (US$43,300) goal in less than 25 minutes, finally finishing with over 12.3 million yen (US$88,800), more than double the asking amount with 647 supporters. 

The visual was scheduled to go live sometime in July and on time, it’s right there now in Shibuya to see. We went out and had a look for ourselves at the life-sized Rent-a-Girlfriend visual.

Compared to the original Rent-a-Girlfriend concept design, the girls are a little more spaced out:

To put in perspective how busy the placement of the Rent-a-Girlfriend visual was, the gates for the JR lines feed right into the space, which includes the Yamanote line, the ring line around Tokyo that millions travel on each day. There was a constant, unending, stream of people walking past the advertisement in the mere few minutes it took to take the above pictures.

And at last, Miyajima got to fulfill his dream of running a successful crowdfunding campaign. 

RELATED: You Can Take Date Photos with “Rent-A-Girlfriend” Heroine Chizuru’s Life-size Figure

Rent-a-Girlfriend season 2 began on July 1, with the series being streamed right here on Crunchyroll soon after it airs in Japan. Crunchyroll describes the series as such:

A hopeless college student, Kinoshita Kazuya, meets a graceful rental girlfriend, Mizuhara Chizuru, and ends up introducing her as his girlfriend to his family and friends. Time goes on with Kazuya unable to tell the truth, as he’s surrounded by devilish ex-girlfriend Nanami Mami, who keeps coming back to tempt him for some reason, hyper-aggressive provisional girlfriend Sarashina Ruka, who doesn’t know how to take no for an answer, and super shy but diligent and hardworking younger rental girlfriend, Sakurasawa Sumi… beautiful girlfriends of all types! The pub, the beach, hot springs, Christmas, and New Year’s… Having gone through these challenging events, Kazuya’s feelings for Chizuru keep growing stronger. But she reveals a shocking truth that threatens to shake their “relationship” to the very core!

Photos by Daryl Harding

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Daryl Harding is a Japan Correspondent for Crunchyroll News. He also runs a YouTube channel about Japan stuff called TheDoctorDazza, tweets at @DoctorDazza, and posts photos of his travels on Instagram.