17-06-2025
The Contestant review — the truth about the most extreme reality TV show ever
It doesn't seem that long ago (except it's 30 years ago) when we would laugh along with Clive James on TV at the Japanese and their crazy game show ways — specifically those madcap endurance shows where contestants were buried in sand, or forced to hold in their bladders after drinking litres of tea (that kind of thing). I'm not sure who this reflected worse on: us or the Japanese culture we were laughing at.
The Contestant, Clair Titley's thoughtful, troubling film shown in the Storyville strand, took us back to the mad world of 1990s Tokyo TV, except this time you won't have laughed once unless you really are a sadist. The 'hilarious' show in question involved a young man being duped by producers into stripping naked, then being starved and bullied in solitary confinement for 15 months.
Young Japanese audiences loved it. The show became a monster hit in 1998. Before we litigate the past too hard, it should be said that Tomoaki Hamatsu, the unwitting young man in question, was also funny and loveable. Yet the popularity of watching the weekly mental disintegration of a man certainly suggests something about audience detachment. The Truman Show, the Jim Carrey film that came out in the same year, clearly didn't go far enough.
Denpa Shonen was an extreme Big Brother before Big Brother even existed. Any hopeful eager to go on the show knew it was about zany endurance antics, but when Hamatsu, an aspiring comedian known at the time as Nasubi, won his Willy Wonka ticket he had no idea what he was in for.
Having been led blindfolded into a small room, he was ordered to remove all his clothes (a particular humiliation for him), then stay there as long as it took him to win one million yen from magazine competitions.
After a few weeks, now emaciated, he was being given bags of dry rice to eat, even though he had no saucepan. Viewers split their sides. 'I was just about not dying, but that's when the real hell began,' recalled Hamatsu, a more sober figure than the manic one seen on the show.
His memories were intercut with those of the show's big-shot producer Toshio Tsuchiya, who during the ordeal went from being 'a god' to Nasubi 'to the devil' and who seemed almost impressively candid about the amorality of it all back then.
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Hamatsu had turned to comedy partly to cope with the bullying he had received at school for his 'long face'. The strangest thing of all was how much Hamatsu played up to the camera as he wolfed down his treat of dog biscuits. At Day 333, he was still doing his best to entertain the single camera trained on him, even though he didn't know this was all being broadcast. In fact, he knew the door was unlocked.
It seems he was caught in a kind of psychological trap — of not wanting to let everyone down, of proving himself as a clownish comic. He explained: 'You hear of people being held captive. How rather than escaping… staying put, not causing trouble is the safest option. You lose the will to escape.'
Hamatsu reflected that it took years to process the 'big black void in my heart' after the show finally ended. Eventually, he turned to self-healing charity climbs up Everest, detailed in the film's lingering final third, which reached hard for a redemptive finish.
Duty of care in reality TV has clearly come a long way, although the uneasy balance between emotional damage and drive for good ratings remains universal. The Contestant didn't interrogate very hard the questions around exploitation.
If Tsuchiya had initially seemed the villain, by the end the guiltiest party was every viewer who screamed with laughter when Hamatsu was finally released — exposed on a stage naked, dazed, horrified, as he found out that he had been broadcast all along. Proof that audiences were laughing at him, not with him.
Now this spectacle is replayed in a documentary not to laughs but astonishment at such cruelty. Which is progress of a sort.★★★☆☆
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