A new documentary about Tomoaki Hamatsu, aka "Nasubi"

May 3, 2024 5:22 PM

An interview with the Japanese comedian about the upcoming documentary (NYT gift link) on Hulu, The Contestant. Previously on Metafilter, "Staying alive became my full-time occupation" we were introduced to the strange tale of the 1998 Japanese reality show Susunu! Denpa Shonen which was famous for taking an aspiring comedian, placing him naked in a room, and telling him that he needed to acquire 1 million yen worth of items via sweepstakes. Now, there is a Hulu documentary (YT trailer link) coming out about how the Eggplant is doing.
posted by Word_Salad (8 comments total)

Also from 2014 on This American Life.
posted by Nelson at 5:42 PM on May 3 [6 favorites]

The gift link is paywalled for me but the doc is good overall. At least the first 2/3rds. Nasubi is so sweet and charming throughout and I feel so bad for what he went through because a TV producer thought it was funny. They treated him so badly I'm surprised he's OK!

I think the documentary is kind-hearted so I don't have a lot of fault with it. I do not have any issue with what Nasubi did after any of this. But as far as the doc goes, it kind of loses the narrative the closer to the end it gets. That's fine, though. I still recommend watching it.
posted by edencosmic at 6:24 PM on May 3

I was just reading about this. Pretty wild - the other stuff that show made contestants do in other years.
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 6:51 PM on May 3

Also from 2014 on This American Life.

And rerun this week, so I'm having that weird feeling where the same story is everywhere.
posted by gurple at 9:45 PM on May 3 [2 favorites]

I highly watching the entire compilation of segments once just to see how you yourself would respond.
posted by weewooweewoo at 1:10 AM on May 4

Unlike LA or SF, Tokyo TV airwaves in the 1990s only had 7 VHF channels (1 & 3, 4 & 6, 8, 10 & 12 on the remote) . . . not a whole of lot of quality options available for a population of ~30M to find (NHK generally had some good stuff at least) and Nasubi certainly fell into the general bucket of what passed for entertainment on TV.
posted by torokunai at 1:43 AM on May 4 [1 favorite]

I remember hearing about this when it happened from some Japanese people and the gratuitous cruelty was horrifying.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 6:44 AM on May 4

Thanks for posting the video, weewooweewoo. NGL it was pretty funny! Watching the humiliating segment around 57 minutes where he's been hungry for days and finally gets dog food delivered. Will he eat the food made for dogs? It's a brief moment of tension. Of course he will eat the dog food.

But what makes it funny is Nasubi gives a really compelling performance. He makes faces for the camera, he says wry things in a loud funny voice, he really hams it up. It's disturbing watching it from this remove knowing how awful this show was to him. But in the moment he seems like a compelling performer. Surely he's in on the joke... right? How awful.

Watching that gave me a sense that Nasubi had a poignant form of agency. It left me more impressed with him and more upset about his being manipulated.
posted by Nelson at 8:11 AM on May 4