Imagine being left alone naked in a room for 15 months and being forced to keep yourself alive by entering magazine competitions for money and free gifts. This was the plight of Tomoaki Hamatsu, nicknamed Nasubi, an aspiring comedian who unwittingly became a star of Japanese reality TV in the late 1990s. The show, Denpa Shonen: A Life in Prizes, was watched by an audience of 15 million. Not that he realised it at the time.
Nasubi’s story is told in UK director Clair Titley’s startling documentary The Contestant, which plays in Sheffield DocFest’s People and Community section having world-premiered at Toronto International Film Festival 2023 (and which TIFF’s Thom Powers described as “the most WTF story in this year’s documentary selection”). The film was made through MRC and Misfits Entertainment.
Although Titley spent much of her childhood in Asia (her father was in the army), she didn’t discover Nasubi’s story until comparatively recently.
“We ended up travelling around. I remember growing up in Nepal and watching Asia’s answer to MTV and renting movies from illegal back alley video stores. You’d be watching a film and then, half way through, you would see a head and somebody stand up with a box of popcorn,” she remembers the pirate videos filmed from the back of cinemas.
Titley first learned about Nasubi in 2017. She had been doing development research on another project. “I went down an internet rabbit hole…You think this is a crazy story, it can’t be true. Then you go down a little bit further and a little bit further…”
The British director was fascinated and perplexed by Nasubi. Why had he put up with the humiliation? How did he believe that he wasn’t being watched? “All of those questions just kept gnawing away at me. I really wanted to tell his story but not in a sensationalist way. I tried very hard not to be pointing and laughing and saying ‘look at those crazy Japanese.’ That’s something I think British television has been very guilty of in the past.”
Titley was aware she was a westerner telling a story about Japan. She was determined at all costs to avoid stereotypes. Her first step was to send Nasubi a letter in Japanese. He replied. His letter was translated for her by a Japanese speaking neighbour in her home town of Bath. At this stage, she was working on “a budget of zero” and so there wasn’t money to hire Japanese linguists. “And Google translate wasn’t then what it is today.”
Later Nasubi came over to the UK on holiday. She showed him the sights and also found time to make a “taster tape.” This was in 2019, pre-Covid. “We hung out for about two weeks,” she remembers. “We got to know each other without the pressure of an interview situation.”
To the director’s relief, Japanese TV producer Toshio Tsuchiya agreed to participate in the film. He could easily have refused. After all, from today’s vantage point, his treatment of Nasubi looks cruel and exploitative. “I was really grateful to him for becoming involved. I think he was very brave to do it. I think it showed a lot of respect to Nasubi,” the director says. Having agreed to take part, the producer didn’t shy away from any difficult questions. He told his story completely honestly.
The story may be seen primarily from the perspectives of the contestant and the producer but one westerner does feature prominently, Juliet Hindell, the BBC’s former Tokyo correspondent.
“I was very clear that I didn’t want a voice of god or a western historian telling us what to think about Japanese culture,” Titley underlines. “The difference with Juliet is that she was there on the ground at the time, reporting on Nasubi’s story throughout. She was the first western journalist to ask him any questions when he emerged. It felt appropriate for her to be in it. She does straddle both worlds. She is inside the story and outside it at the same time.”
There were several formal hurdles to overcome. For a start, Titley had to recreate the graphics from the TV series for an English-speaking audience. The archive from Nippon TV came with “with all these graphics and ridiculous sounds effects all over the top already.” The director worked with a VFX artist who painstakingly withdrew all the sound effects and layers of visuals so it would be possible to see what was really happening to Nasubi. He was a naked man alone in a room.
What was her response as a viewer to watching the show for the first time? “Shock at how long he was in there,” Titley replies. He was locked away for over a year first in Japan and then Korea. “The loneliness was the thing that hit me. I thought how can he do that by himself for so long.”
With her father being in the army, Titley had led an itinerant childhood. Nasubi and Tsuchiya were both the sons of police officers and had also moved around as kids. “I think all three of us have had different experiences of it. Nasubi was bullied. I didn’t feel I was bullied but I think Tsuchiya, Nasubi and me know what it is to move, start making new friends and have that sort of lifestyle where you are not necessary in one place for long.”
The documentary doesn’t just tell the story of the TV show. It also looks at Nasubi’s extraordinary life afterwards. He has become an ambassador for his home town, Fukushima, which has suffered its share of misfortunes including earthquake and nuclear disaster. He climbed Mount Everest to draw attention to the town’s problems and he has become a humanitarian.
“He’s a genuinely good soul,” Titley says of her subject. “He is not somebody who gets angry about anything. He is very serious…for a comedian. His best friend calls him quite square. But he is a good soul. It [the TV show] was definitely a significant part of his life. He has been asked if he regrets it. He says that while he wouldn’t wish to have the experience again, he wouldn’t be the person he is if he hadn’t gone through all those experiences. I see the film very much about someone looking for connections, someone who has been through that childhood and then maybe was seeking connection in the wrong places…”
