Nasubi: The Darkest Reality Show You Haven’t Heard Of
When Nasubi was cast as a contestant for the Japanese reality show Sweepstakes Life in 1998, he didn't know he'd spend the next 15 months in a studio apartment with no food or clothes. All while 17 million people across Japan were watching...
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Heart Starts Pounding is written and produced by Kaelyn Moore.
SOURCES
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2009/12/20/national/those-same-old-jokes-arent-funny-anymore/
https://www.tofugu.com/japan/nasubi-naked-eggplant-man/
https://stylekoriyama.com/fukushima-information/2020/06/10/interview/
https://web.archive.org/web/20060709204217/http://www.quirkyjapan.or.tv/nasubi.html
https://www.videx.jp/detail/hobby/v_h_ntv/hntv0002_0001/index.htm?ref=detail_prev
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2000/09/20/digital/i-want-my-rtv/
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/1999/10/20/digital/the-comfort-of-strangers/ https://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2002/03/24/tv/tune-in-for-the-final-stretch/ http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4819094.stm
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXetSUG3KfI
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Ringley
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susunu!_Denpa_Sh%C5%8Dnen
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susunu!_Denpa_Sh%C5%8Dnen
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/529/human-spectacle
https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%81%AA%E3%81%99%E3%81%B3_(%E3%82%BF%E3%83%AC%E3%83%B3%E3%83%88)
https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%9C%9F%E5%B1%8B%E6%95%8F%E7%94%B7
https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E9%80%B2%E3%81%AC!%E9%9B%BB%E6%B3%A2%E5%B0%91%E5%B9%B4
https://middle-edge.jp/articles/I0002279
https://www.trillmag.com/interesting/susunu-denpa-shohen-the-tv-show-that-forced-a-comedian-to-live-off-sweepstake-prizes/
TRANSCRIPT
To start today’s episode, I actually want to tell you about a show I just watched.
I can’t tell you how many people told me to watch the show Jury Duty. Earlier this year, amazon prime released a show available to everyone, not just prime members, that followed a Jury as they attended a trial. The show is shot documentary style, with talking heads of the jury, similar to The Office. Riveting, I know. Except there’s one huge catch. The trial isn’t real. Everyone on the show is a paid actor, the Judge, the lawyers, the witnesses, and the entire jury. Except for one guy. One guy was plucked from his real life, told that he was selected for a real jury, and had no idea the ENTIRE trial, that everything around him was carefully constructed.
It’s a weird, truman show experiment, that really divided audiences. You watch as actors try not to laugh during outrageous sequences, like a witness that does social media management for her dog, all while Ronald, the real guy, takes it completely seriously. The show is hysterical, but many people, while recommending me the show, had their concerns over the well being of the shows real subject, Ronald Gladden. In the end, he’s shown that everything he’s experienced over the 3 week trial was a lie. He has this kind of glossy eyed, “what” look on his face. His reality, in that moment, was completely broken.
Shows like this have actually been around for a while now. And if you knew a bit more about their history, you may realize that Ronald made it out incredibly lucky.
What if I told you there was a reality show from Japan in the late 90’s that also attempted to do it’s own Truman Show. And that the show, called Sweepstakes Life, can only be described as torture, bending the lines of what was real and what wasn’t for it’s subject, who was manipulated for audience enjoyment for 15 months. Today, I want to tell you the story of Nasubi, an aspiring comedian who was chosen out of obscurity to take part in what was essentially an evil human experiment for television. And as always, listener discretion is advised.
Welcome to Heart Starts Pounding, a podcast of horrors, hauntings, and mysteries. I’m your host, Kaelyn Moore.
This is a community for the darkly curious, and if you’d like to dive deeper into the community, you can follow the show on tik tok and instagram, and you can support the show on Patreon, in our Rogue Detecting Society. there you’ll have access to some bonus content and archived episodes.
On a snowy day in January, 1998, dozens of male comedians in their early 20’s filed into a small casting office in Tokyo. Among them was Tomoaki Hamatsu, who went by his stage name Nasubi, which means Eggplant. He’s a fresh faced 22 year old who had moved to Tokyo to pursue comedy after high school. Nasubi stands taller than the other boys in the casting office, and his goofy energy and large facial expressions set him apart. But, that wont matter, because this audition, for a show he had not yet been told the premise of, had nothing to do with skill or looks.
A producer, a man named Toshio Tsuchiya, comes into the room and tells the boys that the only thing they’ll need for this audition is luck. The boys all look around the room with an excited confusion. This whole day has been a surprise for them. It sounds strange, but they had no idea what they were auditioning for in the first place.
All they were told, was the audition was for a show-business related job. It reads like the beginning of a horror movie, and in many ways, it was.
As producer Tsuchiya is explaining that this is an audition of luck, a cart is being wheeled into the room. On it, a box, dawning a big red question mark. Each man was instructed to go up to the box, one by one, pull out an envelope, and then stand in a circle and open them together. Each of the envelopes were empty, except for Nasubi’s, which contained a white slip of paper with a red circle. At first, he’s confused when he opens it, but when he looks around the room he sees that no one else received a slip. Once it sinks in, he victoriously throws his hand in the air. I’m the winner! He shouts.
[Sound Bite: I won! ]
The producer goes up to him, and Nasubi expects that he’s going to share with him exactly what he won, what the show he just passed the audition for is. But he doesn’t. Instead, the producer whisks him away, it’s time to get started. Now? Nasubi asks. Yes, now.
He doesn’t know where he’s being lead, but he’s excited. As he’s being shuffled towards a car, he turns to the producer and says, It feels like an entire life’s worth of luck has just been spent. No more luck left.
It’s an innocent comment, meant to show his surprise and gratitude for the opportunity. But he could never guess how accurate that statement would end up being. Nasubi’s luck had all been used, considering what was to come, there was no luck left.
Because what Nasubi didn’t know, was that he was auditioning for a survival reality show. The segment they were casting was part of Susunu! Denpa Shonen, a show that would feature multiple extreme survival reality shows, all casted with young men desperate to make it in the entertainment industry.
Nasubi was blindfolded, shoved into a car and brought directly from the casting office to a small, studio apartment. It was incredibly modest, to put it lightly, outfitted with one single stovetop burner, an air conditioner, a toilet and shower. Once he arrived, the blindfold was removed and he saw that the only furnishings were one cushion, a radio, a table, a telephone, stacks of postcards. some notebooks, and pens. What was he doing here, what was this room? And then, he looked to his left, where he saw giant stacks of magazines.
That’s when Nasubi finally learned the point of the show he was to be a part of. He was supposed to go through the magazines, enter as many magazine sweepstakes as he could, and survive off only what he won, nothing more. Any food he was going to eat was going to need to come from his winnings. Once he won the value of 1 million yen, or $10k, he would be free to leave. Oh and he was going to need to strip. Nasubi was asked to remove his clothes, all of his clothes, to begin.
With Nasubi’s shirt, pants, and underwear in hand, the producer and cameraman left the apartment. They tell him that this may eventually be a show, but there’s no guarantee that anyone will ever see this. As they’re leaving, Nasubi can be seen on a hidden surveillance camera shouting “this must be a joke! This can’t be real!”
(soundbite: this cannot be real)
And there he was. Alone in the apartment with no food, no clothes, not even a square of toilet paper. And so, he got to work on the thing that would get him out. He started sending in Postcards to the sweepstakes
The idea for this show isn’t completely random. Sweepstakes mania was alive in Japan, magazines were full of them. Win a vacuum cleaner, a year's supply of rice, posters of movie stars. Anything and everything. So people would often joke that you could survive on sweepstakes winnings alone, that’s how common they were. The show was supposed to be a fun play on that idea.
But as Nasubi sat down and started writing an estimated 1400 postcards a week trying to win something, anything, he didn’t look like he was having much fun. He wanted his clothes back, but he needed to start with food.
it would be a while before he won anything. For the first two weeks, he tried to entertain himself, mostly writing in a journal he was provided, trying to learn how to do a headstand, and listening to the radio. All while waiting for someone, anyone, to contact him and let him know he won something.
then, two weeks into Nasubis stay in the apartment, there’s a knock on the door.
He answers it, clutching the pillow to his groin, his only covering. A delivery man at the door informs him that he has won some jelly.
Nasubi is ecstatic, shouting hooray, it’s here! Finally, a bit of sustenance, the first thing he had eaten since being in the apartment. The package is worth 1560 yen, knocking a minuscule chunk off of the 1 million yen he needs to get. But it’s something.
A knock at the door didn’t always mean something good, however. A few days after the arrival of the jelly, there was another knock at the door. This time, it was a delivery man with ramen and steamed Vegetables. Nasubi is excited, until the man asks for 1700 yen. I dont have any money, Nasubi replies. The delivery man tells him that he must have mistakenly delivered the ramen, takes it back, and leaves. After this interaction we hear Nasubi talking to himself at the table. He’s disappointed and let’s out an exasperated sigh.
On February 22nd, Nasubi wins his next bit of food, a 5kg bag of rice. When he gets the call notifying him, he excitedly throws his hands up in victory and we can see each of his ribs clearly defined. His elbows look particularly knobby as well. If there was any question if the producers were feeding him full meals off camera, it seems, in this shot, we have our answer.
The rice arrives but Nasubi has no way to cook it. He doesn’t have any pots or pans in the room. He tries eating it raw, but it's inedible that way. So he puts some rice inside one of the jelly containers, fills it with some warm water and waits overnight to see if it turns into something he can eat. It doesn’t. But he has a small bunsen burner in the kitchen, so he turns it on, leaves the rice soaking in the jelly container next to the heat for 3 hours and voila, he’s made a kind of rice porridge. All he has to eat it with are pens that he uses as chopsticks, and he looks so pleased with himself.
And this becomes the pattern that his life takes on. Win something potentially useful every few weeks, figure out how to use it with what he has available, rinse and repeat. At the end of his first month, he still needs to win 985140 yen, he’s hardly made a dent. So he hunkers down. He sits at the table, still completely naked, with just a bag of rice to eat, and writes more postcards. He’s still not sure if anyone will ever see the footage of what he’s doing, and at this point, he’s probably thinking that him writing postcards for 9 hours a day is not interesting enough to be on tv.
But what Nasubi doesn’t know, was that these videos were being broadcasted every sunday evening to all of Japan. He was being featured on the show Susunu! Denpa Shonen,which featured other young men doing various other survival challenges. Nasubis segment was called Sweepstakes life, and it was a 5-10 minute part of the whole show. Denpa Shonen was averaging 17 million viewers each episode. About the same amount of people were watching him fight for his life in a studio apartment as the Game of Thrones finale.
And yes, Nasubi was completely naked while his segment was being filmed, so the final version had a large eggplant that moved with him to keep his groin covered.
Sweepstakes Life wasn’t the only part of Denpa Shonen that could be considered tortuous. The day that Nasubi was cast for his segment, some of the other men in the casting office were also cast for the other ones.
One of these other young men can be seen with Nasubi in the initial casting session. He was featured on a segment called Denpa Shōnen's Desert Island Escape, where he and another contestant were dropped on a desert island with no food, water, and told to find a way back to Tokyo. To do that, they’d have to cross miles of open water on just a pedal boat.
Another show was Denpa Shōnen's Vertical Africa-Europe Continental Hitchhike, where two contestants had to hitchhike from south africa to Norway with no money. They endured grueling heat, near starvation and a language barrier on their quest to make it back.
Each sunday, audiences would get updates on how each of the psychotic challenges were going, and they loved it.
But as more and more people started tuning in to Nasubi, he kept fairing pretty badly
February and March slowly crept by, and Nasubi still had only 67,000 yen banked. At this rate, it was going to take him around 40 months to finish the challenge. But the shows ratings were so high, it’s hard to imagine that bothered the producers.
Despite this, Nasubi seemed to be in shockingly high spirits. He would shout and celebrate every time he won something, and even small victories felt like big lottery wins for him.
Over the next few months, things started picking up for him. It seemed that the over 10,000 sweepstakes that Nasubi had entered were finally starting to pay off. A lot of the winnings were useless. A poster of a famous actress, a tv he couldn’t hook up in the apartment. But each time the phone rang or a delivery man arrived at his door, it was like christmas.
However, it’s also around this time that Nasubi’s rice runs out. He hasn’t won any other food since the rice in February. At least, not human food. He has, however, won dog food. Each Sunday, audiences watch Nasubi eat dog food while praying to god for a blessing.
It’s also around the time that the other Denpa Shonen segments start experiencing catastrophic failures as well. One of the two men hitchhiking to Norway collapses and almost dies from dehydration in the sahara desert. The producers say it’s because he was using his very small water supply to water plants, but the contestant knows that’s not true.
On another show, a contestant is pressured to go into a gay club and offer out condoms to patrons. The segment ends with him being beaten, fading to black as you can hear his screams.
This adversity didn’t deter audiences, who kept tuning in in droves despite watching the contestants nearly die. It actually made people love Nasubi more, his spirit in spite of adversity was encouraging, and eventually, die hard fans and the media figure out where his apartment is. When I first read this, I thought that they would be outraged and try to come to Nasubi’s aid. Maybe bring him something to eat, or at least a blanket. But they arrived to observe, to maybe catch a glimpse of Nasubi in the window, or hear him celebrate when he won something
It sounds horribly cruel, but Audiences may not have known how dire the situation was at this point. Yes, they were seeing this torture play out every Sunday for months, but the producers had some tricks up their sleeves to make the show seem more humane than it was. In May, they sent a doctor to check on Nasubi, who excitedly proclaimed that he was in quote Perfect Health. He had not suffered from malnutrition or starvation, despite his increasingly apparent rib cage. This assured audiences that despite what they were seeing at home, this man was not suffering any ill effects.
One night, producers show up in the middle of the night and blindfold Nasubi. They tell him they’re moving him into a new apartment to change his luck, when in reality, they don’t want him to know that the crowds of people gathered outside of his apartment are for him. At this point, Nasubi still has no idea that the entire country is watching him, he doesn’t even know about the show.
So they transport him to a new, nearly identical apartment and fill it with all of his sweepstakes winnings. But when he gets there, he sees that it’s missing a new bag of rice that he has just won. He erupts in anger. How could you have forgotten my rice?! He screams at the producers Don’t you know how important my rice is!? This is the first glimpse we get that something might be snapping in Nasubi's mind.
At the end of his first month in his new apartment, 6 months into his time on the show, he had won over 550,000 yen worth of prizes. Maybe his luck really did change in the new apartment, just like the producers had promised. But then in August he hardly wins anything, and september is even worse. There was one day in September where producers allowed him to go to the beach, fully naked, however. The first time Nasubi saw the sky since joining the show.
Around this time, lead producer Toshio Tsuchia has an idea to take the show to the next level. He wants to live stream it. 24/7 unfiltered access to Nasubi’s life. This was the late 90’s, and the intersection of the new World Wide Web and traditional entertainment was just starting to be explored. He wanted to set up a 24 hour live stream in Nasubi’s apartment. Fans could then go online and stream Nasubi at any time of the day.
This was kind of revolutionary in television. Just two years prior the first ever live stream occurred when a college Junior, Jennifer Ringley, figured out how to live stream from a webcam in her dorm. The camera didn’t have video capabilities, just photo, and every few seconds a photo of Jenny would upload to the internet. Sometimes she was eating, sometimes she was studying. But the internet had never seen anything like it, and soon, her website was seeing up to 7 million visits a DAY.
And Nasubi’s livestream did exceptionally well also. Maybe it was because people could finally see Nasubi in his full form, without the editors hiding some of his bizarre behavior. They could see as he talked to his stuffed animals and played with the prizes he won. They also saw the knobs in his elbows and knees get more pronounced, his hair and beard become more unruly. A team of editors worked overtime to manually keep the eggplant covering his genitals in place. The entire time, Nasubi didn’t know he was being watched round the clock.
Finally, in December, there was a break. Nasubi sits in his room writing postcards when a small bag of rice gets delivered. Nasubi doesn’t know it, but this is the last piece, the bag of rice puts him over the 1 million yen earnings. But he has no idea, he hasn’t been tracking his winnings, the producers have.
It’s not until that night when producers come in and tell him that he’s won, they’re taking him to Korea to celebrate. Nasubi curls up into a fetal position. It’s actually hard for him to speak with the producer here because he’s not used to talking with others. They hand him his clothes back and take him out of the apartment.
He flies to Korea and the producers let him do whatever he wants. He eats Ramen, goes to a theme park, he eats Korean bbq. Really, he's mostly excited about the food. He’s different now. His speech is noticeably slower. His hair and beard are longer. He says that clothes feel scratchy and hot on his skin. He’s less like a small child experiencing the world for the first time, and more like a dog that’s been rescued. He’s excited about this new life, but he’s haunted by where he came from.
Before Nasubi leaves, they have one more thing for him. The producers take Nasubi back to his hotel room, and when he walks in, he recognizes it right away.
It looks nearly identical to the one he just spent an entire year in. Give us your clothes, the producers demand. Now, they tell him, he has to win his airfair back to Japan in sweepstakes.
According to Nasubi, it felt like someone took all his energy away. He felt like he couldn’t breathe, he felt frozen in place. He says no, I’m not going to do it. But Toshio Tsychiya was NOT taking no for an answer. He starts trying to convince Nasubi to get back into the room. This was his cash cow, he literally couldn’t afford to lose him, the show was a hit. Eventually, Nasubi said that he felt worn down, that no matter how many times he said no, Tsuchiya would push back. So he agreed and walked back in the room.
For the next three months, Nasubi sat on the floor and wrote letters. And when enough prizes to win airfare came, he was told he needed to win more until his airfare was upgraded. Then he needed to win first class seats back. The constant dangling of the carrot in front of his face was torture, how could he trust that the goal post wouldn’t just be moved again once he won the next thing. He finally wins a first class ticket home and they bring him back to tokyo just to put him in another apartment. He doesn’t even fight back this time. He’s trained like a dog. He walks in, strips, and sits at the table. Maybe this is just his life now, forever.
[silence]
But then. Just as he’s getting settled into his new apartment. There’s a rumbling. Nasubi looks up, just as all four walls of the room fall away. A live audience is on the other side, cheering wildly, and two announcers run up to him. Congrats! They scream. You’ve won!
[Sound clip “You’ve Won!”]
Nasubi is sitting there, completely naked except for the cushion that he’s holding against himself, and he looks terrified. It’s like he doesn’t know how to react, or doesn’t trust it.
The announcers explain to him that he’s been on television every sunday for the last 15 months, and has been lived streamed on the internet 24 hours a day. Not only that, but the journal he’s been writing in has been published and is a best selling book.
None of this is registering to Nasubi. He has the same, confused yet terrified look on his face that he did when the walls broke away. The first thing he says when the mic is shoved in his face is, “why are they laughing”
What Nasubi is experiencing is shock. Everything he thought he knew for the last 15 months has been a lie, and his brain can not compute the reality.
The show really was finished. Nasubi was done. Though he was free to go back to his apartment, the effects of the show would linger for years to come. It would take him a while to be able to speak at full speed again. Another year for clothes to not feel so uncomfortable on his skin. Though his show was a huge success and his journal a best seller, he went on to become a D list celebrity in Japan, like a lot of reality stars do.
I recently came across An article that was written for the Japan Times in 2000. In it, the journalist calls Big Brother and Survivor, both reality shows shot outside of Japan, Vulgar while singing the praises of Denpa shonen. It seemed wild to methat someone could watch Big Brother, a show where contestants are fed and dressed, live in a nice home and have real prize money they win, and think it was more vulgar than watching a man eat dog food on a 24/7 stream.
But there does seem to be something about Denpa Shonen that could only exist in Japan at the time that it did. For one, the 90’s were a recession in Japan, and it’s been suggested that people enjoyed watching someone who had it much, much worse fight for their lives on reality television. But I dont think that’s it.
No, after 9/11 happened in the US, one of the most watched shows on air was 24, a show where each week Jack Bauer would fight bad guys and win, despite the odds being stacked against him. American’s didn’t want to watch people be tortured, they wanted to see the good guy come out on top
And perhaps in Japan during the recession it was something similar. At the core of each show, at least, according to producer Toshio Tsuchiya, was a person who had nothing, persisting in the face of adversity. It was a man who hadn’t eaten in 2 weeks trying to win food, and excitedly dancing when he did. Japanese scholars have suggested that the popularity of Nasubi says something about Japanese culture, at least at the time. And it’s most apparent with this one simple fact.
Nasubi’s door was never locked. At any point he was free to go. But according to him, he never thought to. He was brought up to keep your head down and do what your told, to push through hard times without making a fuss, to listen to authority. He never made a fuss about what was happening until he was brought to Korea, but even then, he went back into the room.
To audiences, it was admirable, but what we know now, was that it was manipulation. Nasubi had no clothes or money, what was he to do if he left the apartment. He didn’t speak Korean and had no way to get home, so leaving the apartment in Korea was never an option. So he stayed. Who knows how long the experiment would have gone on if they didn’t let him go. He was, by all accounts. Broken.
I recognized the look on Nasubis face when the walls fell away and the audience was revealed when I watched Jury Duty. The look of your whole reality being stripped away. And it made me tense up, despite me knowing that the lead of jury duty had great accommodations the entire time. we’ve come a long way ethically it seems when making these shows, and I actually do recommend the show, I thought it was great.
But when watching reality tv, it’s worth it to ask, who really is the winner here?
This has been heart starts pounding, written and produced by me, Kaelyn Moore. Sound design and Mix by Peachtree Sound. Shout out to our new patrons:
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Special thanks to Travis Dunlap, Greyson Jernigan, the team at WME and Ben Jaffe. Have a heart pounding story or a case request? Check out Heart Starts Pounding.com. Until next time, stay curious. OOOooooOOO!