I was broken. I lost my faith in humanity.  All I got from A Life in Prizes were the skills to survive A Life in Prizes.” – Tomoaki ‘Nasubi’ Hamatsu

You’ll be perhaps surprised to know that despite my predilection towards horror of all sorts and even the horror that can be found in the most unexpected places, I tend to gravitate away from things like true crime and (with some exceptions where baking is involved) reality TV. I’ve always figured that there’s enough fictional horror in my life that I don’t have much space for the real stuff, and that there are too many violent hooligans to fight or at least things to put away to worry about what any of the Vanderpumps or the Housewives (of any geographical origin) are up to. But sometimes, maybe most times, there is more horror behind the eyes of reality stars than anything Clive Barker or Ari Aster can conceive. 

Between Twitch, Tiktok, and the seemingly-infinite number of other windows available to us, we take for granted the ability to share our own experiences and to share those of our peers. But one of the first – predating social media, the widespread adoption of cell phones with media sharing, reality shows like Big Brother and even beating (by mere months) Peter Weir’s The Truman Show and the concept of surveillance-as-entertainment, in 1998 was Denpa Shonen, A Life In Prizes, and Nasubi. 

The story of Nasubi and the ordeal he experienced as the star of a reality show called A Life In Prizes is recounted by Claire Titley both as the filmmaker and an onscreen commentator in her new documentary The Contestant. To describe Denpa Shonen, an incredibly popular Japanese reality series, I am keenly aware that it reads like the origin story of a horror movie villain or at least the premise of a horror movie. It’s central star and Fukushima native Tomoaki Hamatsu was bullied as a child for his unusually-shaped face (hence the nickname ‘Nasubi’ or ‘eggplant’) and soon – like so many – discovered that making his tormentors laugh with him was a way to circumvent this abuse. Deciding to take the path of an aspiring comedian, he’s picked at random from a casting call. Nasubi becomes the subject of a reality show – one of the first of its kind – called ‘A Life in Prizes’ and is thrust into the homes of 30 million people across Japan. The premise of the show is that Nasubi will be locked in a small apartment with almost nothing – not even clothing – but a stack of postcards and a selection of magazines in an attempt to survive only on the winnings from mail-in contests. The show is set to end when Nasubi manages to amass prizes with a total value of a million yen. Naked and starving but always optimistic and determined to complete his task, Nasubi diligently spends his days filling out applications and waiting for prizes to appear. Unbeknownst to him, he becomes a national sensation as his ordeal is filmed 24 hours a day.

But wins aren’t guaranteed, and the producers of the show, in particular showrunner Toshio Tsuchiya, are hell-bent on providing Nasubi with the barest minimum to survive. We watch Nasubi, smiling and playing to the camera even as he wastes away before our eyes, and it feels (at least to me) like a slow-burn torture sequence in a horror movie. Trapping Hamatsu naked in a room for 11 months in a deranged grab for ratings, Tsuchiya becomes, at least for me, one of the most contemptible onscreen characters I’ve seen this year, and this is a year that includes Jigsaw. He claims to be apologetic and even near-suicide after reflection on what he’s put his onscreen star through, but something about it – tone or mannerisms or the occasional snicker – makes this ring hollow. While he laments the hardships that Nasubi undertook, Tsuchiya is quick to spout platitudes like “if there is a god of television, he gave us a gift.” 

Prizes do eventually show up, but they’re often things that Nasubi doesn’t really need, like a bicycle. When a huge amount of dog food shows up and Nasubi, still smiling but so desperate for sustenance that he has to try it, it feels like a low point on both sides of the screen. When a food delivery person shows up and Nasubi lights up in hope, only to find out that it’s not actually for him, I almost turned The Contestant off. The cruelty was too much, and the cruelty was the point. Even with decades of reality television and the indignities it creates and allows, there is something truly shocking about A Life In Prizes and the environment Tsushiya created around Nasubi. There’s something about watching despair or cruelty with a laugh track layered on top that made me feel nearly as sick from the experience as I imagined Nasubi felt from facing it firsthand. 

Spoiler alert: Nasubi makes it out the other end of A Life in Prizes after reaching his goal of amassing 1000 yen in winnings, culminating ironically with a large bag of rice at precisely too late a time for it to be useful. He is harshly awakened in the middle of the night and immediately removed from the apartment in which he’s been confined for 335 days. He’s promised a getaway in South Korea but even this is a cruel betrayal, as he is almost immediately left in another apartment – now in Korea, where he doesn’t even speak the language in which the mail-in contests are conducted – with a challenge to win enough in prizes to afford his plane ticket back to Japan. He is told that he can refuse, but his mind is so flayed from the past year of trauma that it’s hard to imagine that his agreeance is anything resembling enthusiastic consent. To watch this play out in The Contestant placed another layer of disbelief and horror over what I was watching, but as I imagine was the case with much of his audience back in 1998, I couldn’t avert my eyes at that point.

But wait, there’s more. Because the producers of Denpa Shonen apparently didn’t feel that Nasubi had been through enough, after surviving the contest in Korea he’s brought back to Tokyo and dropped into a third apartment. Mentally broken from the last two straight years of isolation and public humiliation, he immediately begins to remove his clothes to undertake yet another contest. At this point, the walls of the apartment fall away to reveal that he’s on a stage in front of hundreds of people. They might adore Nasubi, or be his biggest fans, but it’s hard to see this as anything but one last cruelty to a man that’s been through more than enough. A cheering, enthusiastic crowd is the backdrop for a truly tragic spectacle.

The reflections of Nasubi in The Contestant, years removed from A Life In Prizes are heartbreaking, but leave me hopeful that he has a clear-eyed view of what he’s been through. He is now a successful comedian and public personality, but as I do with many reality shows, I wonder if it was all worth it. The pain, both to Nasubi himself but also his family. The protracted humiliations. The ordeal that inextricably tied Hamatsu to the Nasubi ‘character.’ At one point, he says, forlornly that “[he] couldn’t keep up with people’s expectations of Nasubi.” But those expectations were to play the part of a man who would endure literal torture and remain smiling. At another point, current-day Hamatsu laments that “the fact that I was lonely was erased from the screen.” Decades before COVID and the crippling loneliness that many of us faced, Nasubi’s isolation is even more ironic when his every move, his every unadorned inch of skin, was shared with millions.

If there’s a criticism of The Contestant as a film or as an indictment of Tsuchiya, it’s that it perhaps doesn’t go far enough. It retains and emphasizes the jokey tone of A Life In Prizes in what I assume is an attempt to show how it trivialized the real harm done to Nasubi both physically and mentally. But it never takes that idea any further, and is content to let the footage and the absurdity of A Life In Prizes speak for itself. In truth, it does for me, but a more scathing treatment, especially of Tsuchiya, feels appropriate for the level of horror on display here. 

Given that A Life In Prizes was one of the first forays into the world of reality television, it’s both perplexing and deeply sad to me that the medium not only continued and expanded, but went on to the wild level of popularity that it did afterwards. We have seen so many tragedies and cruelties bear out in the nearly three decades since Nasubi’s ordeal, but his still remains one of the saddest. In perhaps a less cruel, more just world the reality TV experiment – at least the kind that puts it’s subjects through the kind of extreme hardships (or worse) than Nasubi went through – would have died on the vine as the millennium turned over. Alas, cruelty is the point, and we, the rapt audience, keeps tuning in.

Claire Titley’s ‘The Contestant’ is available on Hulu.

Sachin Hingoo prefers the kinds of reality shows where the outcome is cupcakes, not cruelty.