Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Contestant’ on Hulu, a Documentary About an Incredibly Cruel Japanese Reality TV Phenomenon

The documentary The Contestant (now streaming on Hulu) chronicles the ordeal of a reality-TV star who was essentially tortured live, on camera, 24/7, for 15 months. His name is Tomoaki Hamatsu, better known as Nasubi, a nickname he reclaimed after it was given to him by the childhood bullies who teased him for the elongated shape of his face. And the show was Denpa Shonen: A Life in Prizes, a Japanese TV series that makes Jackass look like a Ken Burns documentary. Director Clair Titley where-are-they-nows Nasubi roughly 25 years after he was deceived by a villainous TV producer and humiliated in front of millions of viewers, and digs into some of the nitty-gritty of this fascinating story. 

THE CONTESTANT: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: It’s 1998, two years before Survivor and Big Brother put the phrase “reality TV” into the popular lexicon. Producer Toshio Tsuchiya comes up with a downright diabolical segment for his hit series Denpa Shonen: strip a contestant naked and lock them in a room with little more than postcards and a pillow to sit on, and force them to enter mail-in magazine contests to survive. The goal was to win a million yen (about $7,500) in prizes – and hope some of those prizes included food, because the contestant was given next to nothing to eat in order to survive. The lone participant in the show, dubbed A Life in Prizes, was Nasubi, an odd fellow from rural Fukushima who aspired to be a comedian. Looking back at his youth, Nasubi says he was always socially awkward, and tried to compensate for that by being funny; we meet his mother, Kazuko, who remembers telling him as he left for Tokyo to be an entertainer, “just don’t get naked.”

Lured by Denpa Shonen’s reputation for gifting the participants of its various “endurance tests” with overnight stardom, Nasubi entered a drawing for A Life in Prizes, and soon found himself bare-assed in a tiny apartment, filling out postcards and getting alarmingly skinny. “Rather than naive, he was gullible,” Nasubi’s manager explains to us. Tsuchiya – who amazingly participates in this documentary for reasons I might get into later if it’s not too much of a spoiler – says they obviously didn’t want their budding reality star to die, so they gave him just enough crackers to keep him alive until he wins a bag of rice and realizes he has a stove but no pot to cook it in. He tries eating it raw, and gags. Then he innovates and finds a way to warm it in a package and make a sort of rice pudding. When that runs out, he’s lucky enough to win a case of dog food, which he crunches and swallows, not so convincingly insisting to the camera that it’s delicious. 

Speaking of that camera – this is where the story gets especially disturbing. Tsuchiya flat-out lied to Nasubi that portions of the footage would be edited into segments and aired after he reached his goal. Instead, he left the camera rolling, broadcasting 24/7 on the internet (cue a TV news clip explaining this newfangled thing known as a “webcam”), which helped juice Denpa Shonen’s Sunday-night ratings to 17 million viewers, who laughed and laughed and laughed at Nasubi’s antics. Tsuchiya admits that he was obsessed with coming up with new ways to test his torture subject’s endurance, so he awakened Nasubi in the middle of the night to move him to different locations and keeps moving the goalposts on his achievements, stuff like that. 

The producer also collected and sold copies of Nasubi’s diaries without his knowing. What was in those diaries? Oh, just the innermost thoughts of a man who was experiencing such isolation and despair that he began contemplating suicide. That was the other side of the weirdo who did silly dances when he finally received prizes in the mail and mugged for the camera and whose hair grew out wild and whose genitalia was covered by an eggplant graphic (that was moved around via joystick by a man in a bunker stocked with 50 Denpa Shonen staffers). Doesn’t all this make for such great, hilarious TV?

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: At least The Truman Show was fiction.

Performance Worth Watching: Nasubi fearlessly relives his torture, contrasted by Tsuchiya’s bald admission that some of the things he put his subject through were cruel. However, it takes researching the story outside the film to determine if an apology was offered – or accepted – between these two men.

Memorable Dialogue: “I was tricked, taken in.” – one of the first statements Nasubi made upon finally, at long last, being released from Hell

Sex and Skin: We see Nasubi’s bare hindquarters consistently, and learn the possible origin of the eggplant emoji’s current use as a cheeky surrogate for dude junk.

Our Take: Nasubi has been through enough, so I feel it prudent to resist psychoanalyzing the guy from a distance. However, it’s interesting to note that he could have ended the ordeal at any time – his room wasn’t locked; he had a phone to call producers and tell them enough is enough – but also convincingly expresses how the psychological prison Tsuchiya put him in may have been stronger than any cage. It all points to the all-too-human desire to be loved and accepted by others, which sometimes becomes the desire for widespread fame without consideration for its pitfalls and compromises. Nasubi got his fame, and The Contestant resists saying it was for the better or for the worse. Would he do it all over again is a question Titley doesn’t ask. 

Although Nasubi and the film make it clear that he endured significant cruelty, the director also doesn’t pursue questions of the legality and ethics of Tsuchiya’s actions, and any potential for forgiveness or redemption, which strike me as glaring and obvious omissions. Titley seems to be pursuing something bigger and more complex, and she touches on it in a third act that explores Nasubi’s post-Denpa Shonen life in a loose, vaguely dissatisfying manner (essentially, Nasubi tries to use his fame to raise money and lift the spirits of his fellow Fukushima residents in the wake of the devastating 2011 earthquake and tsunami). It mostly has to do with Tsuchiya’s against-the-odds participation in The Contestant – it seems safe to assume that most producers in his situation would seek to separate themselves from past moral failures – and how he feels he owes something to Nasubi now. 

But Titley doesn’t seem to be quite a skilled enough interviewer to draw much compelling subtext out of current interviews with Nasubi and Tsuchiya. The film leaves behind some ripples in the pond of pop-cultural consumption, showing us that Denpa Shonen crossed lines of reality-TV (and internet content) ethics before they could even be drawn; as exploitative and gross as current entertainment can be, there was a time, ironically more innocent, when it was far worse. 

Our Call: For viewers unfamiliar with Nasubi’s story – likely most of us outside Japan – it’s too fascinating to ignore, even in a sometimes-shaky doc like The Contestant. So STREAM IT, and prepare yourself to be engrossed and a little bit disappointed by this particular telling.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.