Loading player
At the beginning of 1998 Tomoaki Hamatsu was 22 years old and wanted to be a comedian. He was born in Fukushima, in the north-east of Japan, and because of his very pronounced chin he was nicknamed Nasubi, which in Japanese means aubergine. When he signed up to audition for a program he didn’t know exactly what would happen to him, yet within a few months he became the most famous television personality in Japan. He was in fact chosen as the protagonist of Susunu! Denpa Shonenone of the first modern reality shows, with an extreme and controversial format: Hamatsu spent more than a year locked alone in a room, naked and forced to get what he needed only through postal prize competitions.
The thing that seems most absurd about the whole story today is that Hamatsu didn’t know that millions of people were watching him. He had voluntarily participated in the program, agreeing to isolate himself for what became fifteen months and to undergo extreme and, according to many critics, humiliating survival tests. But he had been told that the footage would, perhaps, be broadcast later. Instead, his time in that room was broadcast largely live.
The story of Hamatsu was told in a documentary filmed by the English director Clair Titley, The Contestantpresented at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2023 and available for a few days on the Hulu platform in the United States, which is why it has once again become the center of attention and reflection.
The title of the reality show can be translated more or less as “Stop! Crazy young people”. It was created by Toshio Tsuchiya, a successful producer, who after choosing Hamatsu blindfolded him and led him to a small apartment in Tokyo furnished with a table, a place to sleep and little else, including a shelf full of magazines and a camera who filmed him 24 hours a day. The footage of the hours Hamatsu spent alone in the room was condensed into a shorter segment broadcast every Sunday evening on Nippon TV, without his knowledge and therefore without his consent.
Hamatsu had to undress, because he had to start from scratch in the survival game that had been organized. In fact, the goal he was given was to get food, clothes and everything he needed by registering by post for prize competitions advertised in newspapers, until he won goods worth the equivalent of one million yen (about 8 thousand dollars back then, 15 thousand euros today).
As noted by the Guardianwho interviewed him on the occasion of the release of The Contestant, the difference between the production of a reality show and a cruel social experiment was very subtle. The Canadian newspaper National Post he called the documentary «kind of Truman Show halfway with Oldboy», citing the well-known film with Jim Carrey who plays the unsuspecting protagonist of a reality show and that of the Korean director Park Chan-wook, which is about a man seeking revenge after being held prisoner for twenty years for apparently no reason.
The ways in which Hamatsu spent months and months in the room were in fact extreme. He even went days without eating: he won some rice but didn’t have a pot to cook it (he only succeeded later by using the stove, ensuring a fundamental source of sustenance); he won a can of spaghetti, but he didn’t have a can opener. He even ended up eating dog food and having long conversations with a puppet.
Among other things he also won a TV, but there was no signal, and a bicycle, which he converted into an exercise bike to use in the room. He also won some women’s underwear, but it was too small for him. He ended up remaining naked all the time: his butt and genitals were covered with an aubergine-shaped animation which, according to Juliet Hindell, BBC correspondent in Tokyo at the time, may have inspired the use of the vegetable emoji also for indicate a penis. Once he got out it was very difficult for him to get used to his clothes again.
As he says in the documentary, he suffered from extreme loneliness, since he could not have contact with friends and relatives, and he also had suicidal thoughts. He knew the door wasn’t locked, so he could have left at any time, he said in another interview with New York Times: in the end, however, he convinced himself that he was safer inside the room and took it into his head that he wanted to resist until he reached the established objective, also to test himself.
Meanwhile, outside that room, Hamatsu became more and more famous. His live broadcasts fascinated and entertained millions of Japanese, and over time someone even managed to figure out where the apartment he was staying in was, which forced the production to move him elsewhere, to a very similar room. At the same time, in addition to broadcasting on Sunday evenings, a live streaming via the Internet also began, which was also very popular, albeit with time limitations.
In the first month Hamatsu signed up for more than 5,700 competitions and it took him six months and 30 thousand attempts to reach half of his goal of accumulated prizes. When he finally amassed one million yen in prizes after 355 days, he was convinced he had finished the game, but that wasn’t the case: what he had been told would be a prize trip to South Korea turned out to be another part of the program , in a room the same as the previous ones. His new goal was to win the trip home.
After a while he was blindfolded and moved to a final room, which had actually been set up in a television studio: when the walls fell he found himself in front of hundreds of people applauding, visibly shocked. In the end he had participated in more than 75 thousand competitions, sending more or less 200 requests a day: under the eyes of millions of Japanese every Sunday.
Titley said he discovered the program’s story in 2017, while looking for ideas for a film. To him to say about him Hamatsu had always been treated with little regard, if not with contempt, and it was also for this reason that he wanted to tell his experience of him from his point of view. In the documentary he interviews both him and his mother, sister and a friend, who describe the mixture of shame, pain, sorrow and pride they felt at seeing him in those conditions all that time. Titley also interviews Tsuchiya, who explains how at the time he wanted to «immortalize something exceptional, something incredible. An aspect of humanity that only I, only this program, could describe.”
At the time he told Hamatsu that his videos would never be broadcast, Tsuchiya always says, finally calling himself “a devil”. As he wrote New YorkerHowever, the documentary does not describe him as the only villain in the history of Hamatsu, but also questions the responsibilities of the public, who for months passionately followed a story of humiliation and abuse. Reality shows barely existed, and reflections on the spectacularization of people’s private lives and intimacy were still immature, as were those on the ethical boundaries of television entertainment. According to Titley, “to a certain extent we are all complicit in these mechanisms” and, “as spectators, we need to take some responsibility.”
Hamatsu received 10 million yen (about 150 thousand euros today) for the program, while in the documentary it is not mentioned whether he received royalties on the various products linked to the program which were then sold, starting with his diary, which sold 800 thousand copies.
The return to normal life was very traumatic, and he had difficulty getting used to the new celebrity and reintegrating into society after months and months of total isolation. He remained a notable figure in Japan, but wasn’t sure what to do with his fame. After the Fukushima disaster in 2011, however, he dedicated himself to raising awareness and raising funds for years, organizing various initiatives including several expeditions to Mount Everest, which he climbed in 2016.
In the documentary Hamatsu, now 48 years old, says he was hurt by the fact that “human beings could be so cruel just to be able to make an interesting and famous program and gain popularity.” «It seems like a comedy program», he says, «but people don’t understand the efforts and difficulties I went through. This part wasn’t really shown.”
– Read also: The Netflix show with kids doing things on their own
