Hulu’s The Contestant follows one of the most bizarre and notorious cases in reality show history, giving a mainstream Western audience its first real deep dive into the story of Tomoaki Hamatsu (better known as Nasubi), who in 1998 was forced to live exclusively on what he could win from the contests in the back of magazines, with every moment of his life being streamed online and the highlights being aired as a TV show. It was the early days of reality television, and by the end of his months-long ordeal, Nasubi had lost weight, appeared to be suffering from extreme depression, and had been unwittingly shown naked to the world for more hours than maybe anyone in history.
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If there’s one thing to be said for The Contestant, it’s that the clinical detachment of the documentary format doesn’t quite sell the insanity of the experience, leaving audiences a little less traumatized than they might have been with a little more emotional intimacy. That said, it was important to the filmmakers that they avoided getting too deep and re-traumatizing Nasubi himself.
“Consent has been quite an important part of this whole process,” director Clair Titley told ComicBook. “One of the things that I really didn’t want to do was re-traumatize Nasubi; that was really important. While Nasubi didn’t have editorial control, and we discussed this a lot, it was important that we did represent his story fairly and accurately, so I checked in with Nasubi often. I told him what we were doing and why we were doing it. We went back to him and asked him for ideas, who we should contact, even visual ideas occasionally. It was an ongoing, collaborative process, from the very start, from development, until towards the end of post-production.”
Here’s an official synopsis for The Contestant, taken from the Toronto International Film Festival website:
The Contestant traces the experience of aspiring comedian Tomoaki Hamatsu, nicknamed Nasubi, who unwittingly became an extreme case study. In 1998, Nasubi thought he was attending an audition when a successful Japanese TV producer, Toshio Tsuchiya, enlisted him to take part in a challenge. Tsuchiya led Nasubi into a room, ordered him to strip naked and left him with a stack of magazines. Nasubi’s task was to fill out contest coupons in order to win what he needed to survive — food, clothing, appliances, etc. — until he reached the prize goal of one million yen.
Although Nasubi could have left at any time, he stayed for months with a fierce determination to complete his mission. He was cut off from all contact with his family and the world except for occasional interactions with Tsuchiya. What Nasubi didn’t realize was that his experiences were being broadcast to over 15 million people in a TV show called Denpa Shonen: A Life in Prizes. Without his knowledge or consent, Nasubi became the most famous television personality in Japan.
