Naked and eating dog food: The extreme suffering of a reality show ‘star’

The societal and psychological repercussions of a sadistic Japanese reality show are laid bare in chilling new documentary, The Contestant

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When Tomoaki Hamatsu, an aspiring comedian from Fukushima, found himself at an audition at Japan’s Nippon TV in the late 1990s, he believed he was in the running for one of the first reality TV shows, in which he’d be filmed attempting to hitch-hike across Africa. Instead, on being selected by the producers, he was led to a bare Tokyo apartment, ordered to strip, and told that he would have to survive on the winnings from a constant stream of magazine competitions that he’d be entering – and that he wouldn’t be released until he’d garnered a million yen’s worth of booty.
The challenge, called A Life in Prizes, was among the most extreme to be featured on Denpa Shonen, a kind of Jackass-meets-Squid Game skit show that, even at the height of Japan’s embrace of zoo TV, stood out for its special brand of hysterical sadism.
Hamatsu’s barely believable story is told in the new documentary The Contestant, whose British director, Clair Titley, specialises in what she calls “stories that look a little bit eccentric or insane from the outside, but turn out to have real emotional depth.”
She treats her subjects with care, drawing reflections and confessions from Hamatsu and Toshio Tsuchiya, the producer who masterminded A Life in Prizes, along with a supporting cast of talking heads including Hamatsu’s family (still bewildered at what he went through) and TV personnel (matter-of-fact about the focus on ratings-chasing at the expense of the welfare of those deployed to achieve it). Throughout, she jarringly juxtaposes the antic archival footage with sober testimony to the grave physical and psychological effects that Hamatsu is still living with, nearly three decades on.
Hamatsu, whose strikingly long and expressive face quickly earned him the nickname Nasubi (Japanese for “aubergine”) initially seemed to plunge into proceedings with gusto, scribbling and mailing his entries, announcing each new day into camera with a grin or a gurn, dancing a joyful jig when the prizes – car tyres, golf balls, dress shoes, a live lobster – started to come in, and coining some wacky catchphrases and aphorisms (“There’s so many of them!” he would habitually cry, when confronted by a month’s supply of tinned anchovies or bags of rice; grasping a potato chip, he marvelled that “the excitement of holding one in my hand was like holding the petal of a forbidden flower”).
But behind Denpa Shonen’s whoopee cushion graphics (recreated in English by Titley and her team) and Haribo-OD excitability, darker undercurrents are visible. Grainy footage of Nasubi wrapped in a blanket might put you in mind of hostage videos. And, though just enough food trickles in to ensure that the producers don’t have to pull the plug on the experiment, it’s not always of the most nourishing kind; the sight of Nasubi barking and scampering around on all fours having unexpectedly enjoyed a mouthful of kibble can’t help you unsee his despairing barf as he tries to force down some wet dog food. It’s startling to learn that not only did Nasubi never sign a contract, but also that at no point was the door locked; theoretically, he could have walked at any time.
“I think they took advantage of his gullibility,” says Titley. “He was a real country boy who’d been bullied at school and had this puppyish, anxious-to-please quality. His loneliness, and the fact that he was hungry and disoriented a lot of the time, just brought on this exhaustion and an inability to think beyond his immediate situation. He thought it was best to just do it, get it over with. That’s his character – he doesn’t get cross about anything, even the most extreme things.”
Along the way, A Life in Prizes claimed some notable, and possibly regrettable, firsts: inspired by Hamatsu’s nickname, a producer replaced the black dot covering Nasubi’s genitals as he roved around the room with an aubergine graphic, paving the way for today’s ubiquitous emoji; about halfway through Nasubi’s sentence, sorry, tenure, one of the first 24-hour webcams is trained on him, beating Big Brother to the punch; and Nasubi’s gleeful tearing into the packages holding his winnings is a clear forerunner to today’s unboxing videos.
Initially assured, and believing, that little or none of the material would ever make it to air, Nasubi eventually passed the million-yen milestone after almost a year, only to learn, on his release, that the segments had regularly been watched by 15 million people in Japan, that he’d become a huge celebrity – and that his ordeal was not yet over.
In The Contestant, Titley navigates this combustible material with sensitivity – “I’m hugely aware of the fact that I’m a westerner coming in to tell a Japanese story, and I didn’t want to do any of that point-and-laugh, Tarrant-on-TV kind of stuff,” she says – and a willingness to suspend judgement, something viewers might find harder to do with the entry of Tsuchiya, Nasubi’s chief tormentor, who seems to be in on the panto-villain joke (“I liked to have Darth Vader music playing when I made an appearance,” he says in the film, with a suitably saturnine air), while deploying what amounted to enhanced interrogation techniques.
These included shining a Maglite in a clearly terrified Nasubi’s eyes while firing party poppers in his face to “celebrate” his million-yen achievement, and shipping Nasubi to Korea, ostensibly to enjoy a bowl of kimchi, before depositing him in an identical apartment, removing his suit, and inaugurating a second season – A Life in Prizes: Korea. This time, Nasubi had to master Korean before he could start entering the competitions. After almost 15 months of Nasubi in the room, Tsuchiya engineers a climactic coup de theatre for Nasubi that’s as audacious as it is pitiless – a season finale that, as he correctly surmised, “would go down in television history.”
In his interviews with Titley, Nasubi says he’s still reckoning with some of the consequences of his confinement – hair loss, body aches, insomnia – and, three decades on, while he addresses aspects of his experience with equanimity (“I just tried to get through each day at a time”), and even wry humour (after the end of A Life in Prizes, Nasubi goes to see The Truman Show, “and I looked around for the camera – I was sure they were filming me, watching this film about someone being endlessly filmed”), he still has the slightly bewildered air of the recently de-institutionalised.
As for Tsuchiya, “he was driven and couldn’t see outside of making this incredible show,” says Titley. “TV was like the Wild West then, and they came up with this crazy idea and never anticipated the phenomenon, the runaway train, it would become.” At one point, she says, Tsuchiya had to be dissuaded, post-Korea, from further whisking Nasubi off to Thailand to embed him in a tribe “where he could be naked all the time. The talent agency said look, can we just get him home? See if he’s OK?”
The fact that he wasn’t – when asked if he’d suffered “mental anguish” during the challenge, Nasubi replied “almost every day” – was hidden from the public by judicious editing, as was the TV company’s comprehensive failure in their duty of care. Nasubi was paid a bare minimum for his participation, and saw little from spin-off sales of dolls and the diaries he wrote while on the show, which sold some eight hundred thousand copies. When Titley warns Tsuchiya that the reaction of a western audience to all this might be less than forgiving, his reply is disarming: “I don’t understand why it would seem so shocking – as Japanese people, we’d never do something as awful as Love Island.”
With all that in mind, Titley has been assiduous in assuring Nasubi that, in revisiting his experiences for The Contestant, she’s not seeking to exploit him all over again: “We got to know each other before shooting started, and though he carries this legacy from the show of finding it hard to trust fully – I think there’s always a nagging voice in the back of his head, thinking ‘Am I being taken for a ride?’ – I made it very clear that consent was an ongoing process, and that he wouldn’t simply be cut adrift all over again when filming ended.
“I initially stumbled on this story when researching something else, and went down an internet rabbit hole with it. The most shocking thing to me, as I delved deeper, was that nobody had ever asked Nasubi any questions about how he felt about what had happened to him. There’s a lot he really hadn’t addressed before, and this was the first time that he’d really got to unpack the story. I wanted to show him the respect I think he deserved”.
Reactions to The Contestant tend to mirror current tribal and social preoccupations – the Americans are incensed that Nasubi didn’t sue, Europeans invoke the MeToo movement, and a woman in Canada told Titley she’d made a really important film about coercive control.
As for Nasubi himself, “I feel that he might have found this whole process cathartic,” says Titley, particularly as the film’s final act charts his efforts to help his native Fukushima, devastated by the 2011 tsunami and nuclear disaster, by undertaking an ascent of Everest. “He says his time in A Life in Prizes, and the resilience he found in himself there, was the best preparation,” says Titley.
The Contestant ends with Nasubi’s triumphant dispatch from the summit – a man finally calling his own shots. “At last he’s where he wants to be,” says Titley, “this person who went in search of connection as a boy, but looked for it in the wrong places, and has finally found it in the unlikeliest place. For him, that’s the biggest prize of all.”
The Contestant will be previewing in cinemas from November 27. In cinemas nationwide from Nov 29; thecontestantmovie.co.uk
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