Still scarred: The Japanese comedian who unknowingly starred in a reality TV show

Japanese comedian Tomoaki Hamatsu, best known as Nasubi or Eggplant in English, says there are two very different perspectives on what he unknowingly went through for a hit reality TV show 25 years ago.

“In Japan, it’s that variety show that had that really wacky event and that guy was naked all the time,” he says through an interpreter from Tokyo. “Even now people come up to me to say, ‘Look, why don’t you do it again because that was really fun’.”

A TV star who had no idea he was on TV … Tomoaki Hamatsu aka Nasubi in The Contestant.Credit: Sydney Film Festival

But when overseas interviewers ask Nasubi about his time on a show called Susunu! Denpa Shōnen (Do Not Proceed! Crazy Youth), they are invariably concerned about what he endured to entertain more than 30 million viewers every week.

“They’ve said, that thing that happened to you, that wasn’t right, that’s a violation of your human rights and you should be maybe thinking about suing the TV station or the production company,” he says.

Australian audiences are used to reality TV shows feeding contestants stomach-churning meals and immersing them in tanks of snakes (I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here), locking them in a house with other strangers (Big Brother) and marrying them to partners who are guaranteed to generate drama (Married At First Sight).

While some participants go on to successful media careers, others struggle with being portrayed as a villain, being rejected publicly on screen or being trolled once they leave a show. According to the podcast Edge of Reality, more than 40 deaths around the world have been linked to reality TV, including four suicides associated with Love Island.

But even compared to the most extreme reality shows of recent decades, what Nasubi went through still seems staggering.

As recounted in the documentary The Contestant, which is having its Australian premiere at Sydney Film Festival, the naive young aspiring entertainer from Fukushima was selected for what he thought was a show that would have him hitchhiking across Africa.

Instead, Nasubi was taken to a sparse apartment, told to strip naked and left with a rack of magazines and a phone. His task was to enter magazine and radio competitions to win what he needed to survive, including food, clothing and household goods, while being cut off from the outside world until his winnings totalled one million yen.

The show’s famous producer, Toshio Tsuchiya, told him that it was an experiment and that most of what they filmed would never be broadcast. Nasubi thought the show would never screen at all because it wasn’t funny.

What he didn’t realise was that the film from two cameras recording his every waking move was being edited into a six-minute segment that was broadcast every week. Years before it became a famous emoji, a digital eggplant covered his penis on screen.

As days turned into weeks, Nasubi won all sorts of products. When dog food arrived, he was hungry so he ate it. The apartment filled up with such random products as a vacuum cleaner, bags of rice, a toy seal, sake, a live lobster, car tyres and a tent.

He was such a charismatic screen presence, dancing with joy when his prizes were delivered, that it became one of the most popular shows on Japanese TV. And despite increasingly struggling with loneliness and the lack of human connection as the weeks became months, he had unknowingly become a TV star.

When Nasubi finally got out after more than a year and discovered he had been on TV every week, he struggled to comprehend what had happened and lost his faith in humanity.

With a digital eggplant to cover his modesty, Tomoaki Hamatsu became an unwitting reality TV star in Japan.Credit: Sydney Film Festival

“They threw me out into society and I didn’t know what had taken place,” he says. “There were all these people pointing at me going ‘there’s Nasubi, there’s Nasubi’. I thought they were plants that the TV station had put into the streets to provoke a response from me and they’d be filming it secretly from somewhere for a prank show.

“I felt that way for six months, maybe 12 months. It took a very long time to get over that paranoia.”

As he tried to make sense of the experience, Nasubi went to watch The Truman Show which had been released in Japanese cinemas while he was inside his apartment. “For me, that film is not fiction,” he says. “That’s a documentary of my life.”

Tsuchiya, the producer, is still unrepentant. “If there is a god of television, he gave us something so great,” he says in The Contestant. “I think it was a real gift.”

Nasubi has turned his life around in surprising ways that are best not revealed before watching the documentary. The diaries he wrote while on the show have sold more than 800,000 copies.

But why relive such a painful experience in a documentary all these years later?

Nasubi says he has had one or two inquiries every year but only agreed when English documentary director Clair Titley wanted to tell the story from his perspective and, if it was still traumatic, get him whatever help he needed.

“It seemed like an excellent opportunity to fill the gap between these two completely different interpretations of what happened,” he says. “I wanted to pass on the notion that we can all change. That we can all grow. We can turn around and try to help society.”

Titley was researching another documentary when she came across Nasubi’s story.

“The more I read about it, the more insane it sounded,” she says from her home in Bath. “I didn’t feel that a lot of what had been written about it had been gone into much depth or really explored Nasubi’s story, so that’s what I set out to do.

“A lot of the West’s perception of Japanese culture sometimes can be - not always - a little bit ‘point and laugh at the Japanese and how crazy they are’ and I was so desperate not to do that.”

While not defending the show’s producer or director, Titley says there was no evil plan behind what they did. “They were making it up as they went along,” she says.

Nasubi was also trusting, had a sheltered upbringing and wanted to get ahead in comedy, which was why he stayed in the apartment when he knew the door was unlocked and he could have left at any time.

“When they tried to recreate the show again, they couldn’t get anybody to stay in there for more than 10 days,” Titley says.

Nasubi now acts with a theatre company in Tokyo and returns to Fukushima to work in what he calls small documentaries providing information about local areas. He is not a fan of reality TV.

“You don’t want it to deepen the darkness that’s already in society,” he says. “I survived and, as a survivor, I know that these things create all sorts of tensions in people that participate in them.”

Does he still carry scars?

“On the trauma, I feel like I’ve kind of gotten over it,” he says. “But there’s a sense of loneliness that never goes away. There’s a sort of an existential void that I just can’t fill. I just can’t bring myself to trust people to this day.

“Maybe that’s why I haven’t settled down and married and had kids. I do wonder about that a lot.”

The Contestant screens at the Sydney Film Festival, with Tomoaki Hamatsu and director Clair Titley as guests, on June 7 and 8.

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