The Contestant
Clair Titley’s gripping documentary tells the story of a dark chapter in Japanese television.
Image courtesy of Hulu
Is fame worth suffering for? And would that still apply if you had no idea you were famous? The subject of Clair Titley’s documentary is a man named Nasubi. Meaning ‘Aubergine’ or ‘Eggplant’, Nasubi was a nickname given to him by childhood schoolmates as a way of mocking his long face. The fact that he adopted this nickname is the first key we’re given to understanding him as a person, with the second being his point about his use of humour as a countermeasure to deal with bullying; Nasubi, whose real name is Tomoaki Hamatsu, says he learned he was able to fend off the bullies if he himself bought into their cruel jokes and entertained them.
The Contestant’s story begins in the late ‘90s, when Nasubi auditions for a television show called Denpa Shōnen, specifically the new segment A Life in Prizes. When he gets the part, he’s overjoyed, but he doesn’t know what the new segment will be about. By the time he finds out, it’s already too late – he’s been blindfolded and dropped off in a room where he will be forced to stay until he wins the equivalent of a million yen (somewhere around £6,000) in prizes from magazine sweepstakes. He is stripped of all his clothes and has nothing in his room apart from a radio, stationery, and lots and lots of magazines. If he wins clothing, he can wear clothes; if he wins food items, he can eat. Of course, they can’t just let him starve, so producer Toshio Tsuchiya feeds him crackers whenever he comes uncomfortably close to starvation.
If Nasubi is our hero, then Tsuchiya is our villain – he was the man who birthed the idea of A Life in Prizes, and The Contestant features interviews where he tells his perspective of the events. But this isn’t a perspective that will in any way redeem him for what he did, and there would be no need for underhand editing tricks if Titley wanted to show him as evil. At one point he openly opines that building up a man’s hopes before taking everything away from him would make for some damn good television… and the most disturbing thing is that he’s probably right, at least according to the public – A Life in Prizes broke Japanese television records with 17 million viewers on each broadcast.
But can we blame them for watching? To paraphrase Nasubi’s own words, if you add voiceover, graphics and sound effects, it lightens the tone, and dour moments might start to seem funny. Furthermore, Nasubi is a very talented entertainer. He immediately became widely beloved in Japan after the show began, although he didn't know this at the time. (Tsuchiya told him early on that most of what they’re shooting wouldn’t be aired.) The audiences were definitely rooting for him, but simultaneously finding enjoyment in his misery.
Nasubi’s affinity for entertaining Japan can perhaps be explained by that early clue regarding his bullying. His axiom of entertaining bullies in order to survive was ingrained since childhood, and in A Life in Prizes he seemed to find himself in a familiar dynamic. It’s the mark of a great documentary when you come out feeling like you understand the person it chose as its subject, and Clair Titley’s film is a perfect example of this. We feel we know Nasubi inside and out because we’ve spent so much time with him during his daily routine, even if it consists entirely of filling out magazine sweepstakes.
Despite the fact that this is ostensibly a documentary about A Life in Prizes, Clair Titley refuses to let Nasubi be defined by the suffering he went through, and dedicates the film’s final act to showing the inspiring direction his life went in after the show. It turns out his extraordinary resilience wasn’t the extent of his capabilities, and his strength of will, when channelled into something positive, can bring about a lot of good in the world. By the time the credits roll, The Contestant is not just the story of A Life in Prizes, and an examination of the exploitative nature of reality TV, but the story of a remarkable, unbreakable man.
JONAS BUTLER
Featuring Tomoaki Hamatsu, Toshio Tsuchiya, Fred Armisen.
Dir Clair Titley, Pro Megumi Inman, Andee Ryder and Ian Bonhôte, Screenplay Clair Titley, Ph Mikul Villaluna Eriksson, Ed Rachel Meyrick and Katie Bryer, Music Nainita Desai.
Misfits Entertainment-Hulu.
90 mins. UK. 2023. US Rel: 2 May 2024. UK Rel: 29 November 2024. Cert. 12A.
