Warning: This post contains spoilers The contestant.
Before shows like Survivor, Big BrotherIt is Naked and afraid became mainstays of American pop culture, there were Japanese reality shows Susunu! Denpa Shōnen. Known for putting participants in extreme situations, Denpa ShōnenThe most famous challenge of 1998, “A Life in Prizes”, made a star of Tomoaki Hamatsu, an aspiring comedian nicknamed Nasubi who, for more than a year, lived alone and without clothes in a tiny apartment while surviving on winnings in magazine sweepstakes.
The twist? Although Nasubi knew he was being filmed, he had no idea that the footage was being broadcast to more than 15 million people every week on the Nippon TV network.
In Hulu’s new documentary The contestantnow streaming, British filmmaker Clair Titley (Britain’s oldest stand up, The British woman on death row) revisits the 15 months Nasubi spent in isolation – and what happened when he discovered he had unwittingly become a national celebrity. Titley says she was drawn to the unusual details of Nasubi’s story. “You know when you’re supposed to be working on something and suddenly you think, wait a second, this seems a little more interesting,” she says.
But after going down an internet rabbit hole on the subject, Titley felt most of the information available online was “pretty simplistic.”
“A lot of it was almost derogatory toward Japanese culture,” she says. “It was a bit of pointing and laughing at the Japanese, look how crazy they are, and that was it. I had all these questions. I wanted to know more about the human side of Nasubi’s story during and after Denpa Shōnen.”
The contestant uses archival footage, news segments and interviews with Nasubi, Denpa Shōnen producer Toshiba Tsuchiya and others close to the story to delve deeper into what Nasubi experienced and how it impacted her life. “It was difficult to revisit the past because I had a big hole in my heart,” Nasubi told TIME about reliving her time on the show. “So it was a little traumatic for me.”
Noting that while it may seem easy to dismiss “A Life in Prizes” as overtly cruel, Titley says that one of her first encounters with Tsuchiya made her question her views on how Denpa Shōnen compares to today’s reality shows. “We put it to him that people are going to think this was one of the cruelest things on television,” she says. “And he said to us, ‘Well, the Japanese would never do something as cruel as Love Island.’ We can sit here and judge, but how far have we really come?”
Here’s what you should know about the real story behind The contestant.
What happened to Nasubi during “A Life in Prizes”?
After winning a random draw at a January 1998 audition in Tokyo, Nasubi was taken to a small, sparsely furnished room, isolated from outside communication, told to undress, and challenged to enter and survive on the winnings from magazine sweepstakes sent by post. until you win the equivalent of 1 million yen (about US$8,000) in prizes.
He was told there was a camera in the room, but that most of the footage would probably never air – a ploy by the producers to make him act more naturally. Instead, a segment called “A Life in Awards” began running weekly on Denpa Shōnen– and quickly skyrocketed in popularity. In the first few weeks, before Nasubi received any awards, the producers gave him cookies so he wouldn’t starve. Once he started winning, he survived by eating everything from fiber jelly to rice to dog food.
Concealing his genital area first with a black circle and then with an eggplant emoji — a nod to his childhood nickname Nasubi, the Japanese word for “eggplant” and a joking reference to the shape of his face — “A Life in Prizes” displayed the Nasubi filled out countless sweepstakes entry forms, celebrating with a dance each time she won a prize and going about her daily chores. They gave him a diary, which was published during his time in the room and became a bestseller in Japan.
Although Nasubi could have told producers he wanted to leave at any time, his mental health deteriorated to the point where he felt he could not leave. Physically, he was losing weight and hair, struggling to sleep and suffering from near-constant pain. In The contestantNasubi talks about how he often wished for death during his time in the room.
After almost a year, Nasubi reached his goal of 1 million yen and was finally allowed to leave. However, after being taken to South Korea by Tsuchiya for a celebratory meal of Korean barbecue and a day at an amusement park, he was taken to another tiny apartment and told he needed to repeat the process until he won the prize equivalent to a flight home. While Denpa Shōnen was edited to make it seem like Nasubi immediately agreed, in fact it took Tsuchiya several hours to convince him to stay.
“In my life, that year and three months were the bottom of hell,” Nasubi told TIME. “But the worst moment was when I finished the assignment in Japan, I was taken to Korea, and Tsuchiya told me to do it again. process to make me agree. Tsuchiya said that when he asked me to do it again, he saw anger coming out of every pore of my skin.
After another three months, Nasubi achieved his goal and, still naked and unaware of his fame, was taken live to the studio audience to celebrate the end of his time on the show. The footage used in The contestant shows Nasubi looking completely shocked and disoriented as the audience applauds.
“One of the things I was really conscious of when making this film was the fact that I was a Western filmmaker making a film about something that happened in Japan,” says Titley of what she wanted to convey about the improvisational tone of Japanese TV. in The Hour. “[The West] has a history of simplifying and belittling Japanese culture. So one of the decisions [producer Megumi Inman] And what I said from the beginning was that we didn’t want to have a Western historian as a voice of God telling viewers what to think.”
During his interviews in The contestant, Tsuchiya speaks in a manner that appears to be cold and callous about what he did to Nasubi and appears unremorseful for his actions. When asked how he feels about Tsuchiya today, Nasubi told TIME that his emotions are complicated. “I still hate him,” he says. “But he agreed to be interviewed for this film and helped us get footage from Nippon TV. So that was kind of an act of redemption.”
And after the show?
The final half hour of The contestant explores what happened to Nasubi after her time in Denpa Shōnendelving into his struggles readjusting to real life and dealing with sudden fame before ultimately rediscovering his purpose in helping others.
After the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, which resulted in a major nuclear accident in Nasubi’s hometown of Fukushima, Nasubi dedicated himself to rescue and relief efforts. “I was traumatized. And the people in my hometown, Fukushima, were the people who helped fill the void in my heart,” he told TIME. “So when the earthquake happened, of course I wanted to help the local people. I realized that the struggles of my past could be useful in a situation like this, which was a surprise to me. everything for and this was my destiny.”
Nasubi ultimately decided to climb Mount Everest to raise awareness about the disaster and, despite her negative feelings towards Tsuchiya, approached the producer for help financing the trip. “I had no contact with him for over 10 years, and during that time he was a symbol of hate to me, someone I truly despised,” says Nasubi. “But when I decided to climb Everest, I contacted him for the first time and he said, ‘I would do anything to help you’ and apologized for all the terrible things he put me through.”
After three failed attempts in 2013, 2014 and 2015, Nasubi managed to climb Everest in 2016. Today, her commitment to helping others continues to guide her life. “Twenty-five years have passed [since “A Life in Prizes], so I changed and the people around me changed too. I realized that I can’t change the past, but by changing the way I think about who I am today, I can always change the future,” he says. “When you put energy into other people, instead of just focusing on yourself, you become stronger than you could ever imagine.”
This story originally appeared on Time.com read the full story
