Review of The Contestant (2023)
Seen in 2025.
In January 1998, “Nasubi” (Hamatsu Tomoaki) is a young comedian, socially conditioned by bullies. He spends 15 months—all the way to April 1999—in something like solitary confinement. He’s not actually locked in, but he’s naked in a tiny apartment, he’s almost always alone, and he does not have access to proper food, cookware, windows, or exercise equipment. He knows he’s being filmed, but he has been told that the footage won’t be broadcast. Depressed, he loses track of time and ponders suicide.
The footage is broadcast. Eventually, it is even livestreamed as a webcam show with live censorship of Nasubi’s genitals. Nasubi’s depression is concealed. Without knowing it, he is in a cruel reality TV show called Denpa Shōnen.
The first two thirds of the documentary provide a pretty good summary of the ordeal, except for a few points. Pay is never discussed, and the move within Japan is not explained. The reason for the move is that viewers found the first apartment. More importantly, the question of what the man actually believed was happening is not resolved. Perhaps he thinks it’s all some kind of audition for a job in TV, which is what he came to Tokyo to do, but that is not clear.
The remainder of the documentary concerns Nasubi’s later life. This is interesting, but only due to a couple of coincidences (earthquakes) more than ten years later. It casts very little light on the experiment.
Contentwise, I would have preferred hearing from academic experts on reality TV, torture, and law. Visually, the documentary is dominated by footage from Denpa Shōnen, which is so low in resolution that it takes up only a fraction of the screen. The superimposed captions typical of Japanese chat shows are edited out and translated into English, which is especially awkward when there’s so much room available to show both the original and the translation at once.
References here: “Reality TV” tag description.