The story of Nasubi, a Japanese game-show contestant who was livestreamed naked for a year, is a real-life Oldboy, full of terrifying turns. It’s streaming now.
Twenty years ago, Park Chan-wook’s revenge thriller Oldboy turned him into a worldwide star, setting off a new wave of Korean neo-noirs and helping break down barriers for international cinema. The movie’s memorable, irresistible hook: After a drunken bender, Korean businessman Oh Dae-su wakes up in a small, dilapidated hotel room, where he’s been imprisoned by unknown parties. As months pass with no contact from the outside apart from anonymous food deliveries, he begins to unravel, numbed by isolation and helplessness.
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Watching Hulu’s mesmerizing documentary The Contestant, it’s hard to believe Park and Oldboy manga writer Garon Tsuchiya didn’t take some inspiration from its subject, Nasubi. Starting in 1998, Nasubi spent more than a year naked, starving, and cut off from the world in a similarly small suite as part of a Japanese game show, utterly unaware that he was eventually being watched by 17 million gawking fans. His real-world story was considerably less gory than Oldboy, but it’s even more startling, given its big, surprising twists — and given how complicit Nasubi was in his own captivity and worldwide exploitation.
Clair Titley’s documentary starts with a brief overview of the game show, Susunu! Denpa Shōnen, and the environment that enabled it. In an era where reality TV was just starting to take off, Susunu! Denpa Shōnen specialized in luring participants into performing elaborate, dangerous stunts in the hopes of furthering their entertainment careers. A quick montage of footage from the show blitzes across a few of the show’s other most notorious moments, including an intercontinental hitchhiking trip that hospitalized one participant, and a stunt where two comedians were given a swan-shaped pedal boat and told to pedal from India to Indonesia.
But by far, the show’s most notorious project was “A Life in Prizes,” a segment where a would-be comedian was placed in a room, naked, with nothing but a rack of magazines and a pile of postcards, and ordered to live entirely off whatever he could win by entering magazine sweepstakes.
Producer Toshio Tsuchiya told Denpa Shōnen contestant Nasubi (born Hamatsu Tomoaki — the unusual shape of his face inspired his stage name, “Eggplant”) that he’d live in a room with one tripod-mounted camera, which he’d use to videotape short daily check-ins as he entered sweepstakes and slowly amassed 1 million yen worth of prizes.
