The Contestant: Reality TV show saw man live on competition prizes

As part of a problem for a reality TV show, a Chinese man was stripped off and left only in a nearly empty house in 1998.

Tomoaki Hamatsu, known as Nasubi, was left with just a ink, some empty cards, a telephone and plate full of newspapers.

But he was unable to learn. The show’s goal was to see if a person may survive solely on money from competitions.

In order to get the problem, the value of the prizes he won had to approach a particular financial boundary- 1m yen, around £6, 000 at the time.

He did not come for 15 months, following a continuous descent into melancholy and madness, driven by appetite and loneliness. His struggle is being revisited nearly three decades later as part of a new movie that has just screened at the Sheffield Documentary Festival.

Clair Titley, the chairman of The Contestant, recalls that I encountered his tale while working on a different job and lost myself in one of those online squirrel holes.

” But I discovered that a lot of the language I encountered was almost offensive. Everything had really talked about Nasubi’s account in detail. ] I had ] all these questions such as, why did he stay in there, and what effect it had on him. So I contacted him with that idea, that I wanted to make a video about his knowledge”.

Nasubi, who had been randomly selected at an open audition, knew he was being filmed, but the explanation given to him about where the footage would end up was vague, and left him with the impression it probably would n’t be broadcast.

In fact, the 22-year-old was slowly gaining popularity as one of the government’s biggest celebrities as regular reports on his development turned into one of the most watched segments of the variety show Denpa Shönen.

Critics generally hated the project, but it attracted a large audience of young people.

Before The Truman Show, starring Jim Carrey as a man who does n’t know his life, the program began airing.

And it would take another month before Big Brother had debut in the Netherlands, introducing a brand-new age of real television.

However, A Career in Prizes, as the sector was known, is still largely unknown outside of his native country despite being a portent of things to come.

” I think people have heard about it more in the past century, since YouTube has definitely exploded”, Titley says. However, it was never shown outside of Japan and South Korea at the time. It was never intended to be broadcast outside of that country.

Nasubi, an budding artist at the time, knew little aspect of what the problem would be before it started.

He was left in the windowless room without any simple items, including clothing and toilet paper, and had no interaction with the outside world.

New interviews are conducted for The Contestant with both Toshio Tsuchiya, the manufacturer responsible for the section, and Nasubi.

Another contributors include those who were directly involved in the coverage of it, such as a past BBC journalist who was based in Japan.

The film follows Nasubi’s development in the same manner that TV viewers did at the time, which is because so much of the story is contained within the film itself.

Titley says she and her group went through the initial footage “painstakingly” to remove out much of the original equipment.

” All the images was covered in Japanese images, it’s got Japanese story, canned laugh, sound results, it’s a jumble of noise and images”, she explains. So we made an effort to make it understandable to those who spoke English.

The team reconstructed the sound as effectively as they could, using English equivalents of Chinese graphics. To convert the original remark, an English-speaking speaker was employed.

Critics are as fascinated by the account as they are repulsed by Nasubi’s suffering as the video itself has already been broadcast on Hulu in the US.

The Contestant is “both a can’t-look-away car wreck and an indictment of viewer complicity,” said Rolling Stone’s David Fear.

” A chronicle of a media phenomenon, a reality TV landmark and a psychological nightmare packaged as entertainment, it is the type of documentary where you’re aware that what you’re witnessing is 100 % true, and you still ca n’t quite wrap your brain around what you’re seeing”.

IndieWire’s David Ehrlich described the original footage as “so hypnotically sadistic” that the newer footage struggles to compete with it.

” None of the film’s longitudinal conversations, candid and intelligent as they are, prove as gripping as the natural film of Nasubi’s ordeal”, he said.

In the end, Titley’s film is more of a review of one of the most outstanding characters in that channel than it is a commentary on an overall medium.

Nasubi was effective in many of the contests he entered as the present progressed, but the rewards he won were n’t often of much use.

Among them were wheels, golf balls, a camp, a world, a teddy bear and cards to Spice World: The Movie.

The producers, one of whom suggests in the documentary that Nasubi could have died if he had n’t won rice in one of the prizes, seemed to be less concerned about how he was getting weaker.

He later won dog food and sugary beverages, which he stayed away from for a few months.

Around 15 million people watched his victories and how he used them to succeed.

Because he never won a wearable item of clothing ( his genitalia are covered by a floating aubergine emoji added by producers ), Nasubi remained naked the entire time he participated.

Nasubi was technically free to leave the house at any time, even though the door was n’t locked. So why did n’t he?

” I think there are a lot of factors”, Titley says. ” One is he’s quite philosophical, and that’s because of where he comes from in Fukishima, and his parents, who were very rigid.

” He’s even a very faithful people. He did n’t want to get into trouble, and he was very young and naive. He’s also very reliable right now. Additionally, there is the Japanese Samurai adage,” I may succeed and I will persevere through this.”

Nearly three decades later, Nasubi has described the present as” cruel”, adding that there was” no joy and no freedom”.

“Maybe three or five minutes a week out of my life [were shown]. And that was edited to highlight my happiness when I won [a prize],” he told Deadline.

” Of program, viewers may say,’ Oh, view, he’s doing something fun and something that he’s enjoying …’ But the majority of my life was suffering.”

And yet, he does n’t come across in the documentary as bitter about this experience, and Titley says her impression was that” he’s in such a positive place now”.

” When people have asked him if he regrets it, he always says that while he would n’t want to do it again, he would n’t be the person that he is ]otherwise],” she says.

Nasubi was finally freed via a Michael McIntyre-style stunt, in which he was taken into a brand-new fake room before the walls collapsed to reveal that he was actually performing live in front of a live audience yelling his name.

The documentary follows Nasubi after his release, highlighting his efforts to use his newfound fame for good causes, ultimately giving him a sense of fulfillment.

Titley claims that Nasubi believed the right moment to revisit his story, adding that he “had perhaps found some peace with what had happened.”

It’s unlikely that viewers would support such a format today because duty of care practices in the 1990s are not what they are today.

However, the documentary raises questions about where to draw the line when it comes to entertainment and how much audience apprehension is to blame.

” Titley says”” I would love people to reflect on their own interactions with social media and reality television, and how complicit we all are as viewers and consumers.

Later this year, The Contestant will be available in the UK.