The Contestant is an intimate portrait of Tomoaki Hamatsu, better known as Nasubi, who in the late 90’s was kept in a room of only bare necessities with racks of magazines, in which he could win prizes to live off of, filmed 24/7 and broadcast to all of Japan each week. Naked and alone, the show Denpa Shōnen lasted for a year and 3 months, as Nasubi spiralled into loneliness and was pushed further by the show’s producer, Toshio Tsuchiya. Director Clair Titley set out to show Nasubi’s story in full, his life before and after the show, and all the characters along the way.
This is such an exciting documentary. I’ve been personally interested in Nasubi for so long, and this documentary explores every nook and cranny, it gets to the heart of this beautiful human story. So where did you first hear of Nasubi? How did this all begin?
I was doing research on another project, and you know when you get lost down one of those internet rabbit holes and you’re supposed to be working on one project, and then all of a sudden, you’re like, just 10 minutes more on this! 10 minutes more! I just got myself lost down this rabbit hole of Denpa Shōnen and all the different stunts that they did and with Nasubi’s story in particular, obviously, it’s so shocking. I wanted to know more, and I wanted to know more about his specific story, about what had happened to him afterwards. I felt like a lot of what had been done previously had been quite “point and laugh at the Japanese” and had ended when he left the show. I wanted to tell Nasubi’s story. I reached out to him and said, I’m really fascinated, and I want to tell this from your perspective.
The way the Western world responded to it was very point and laugh. And The Contestant avoids being that, it’s really non judgmental.
We’re really cautious about that and it was something that I talked about to my producer Megumi Inman, who is Japanese British, and we worked together really closely and kept checking in with ourselves and with Nasubi that we weren’t regurgitating Japanese tropes or stereotypes.
The footage from Life In Prizes is often exploiting Nasubi, but you’re also using that footage in your documentary, how did you tow the line between using that footage but it not being exploitative?
There’s two things that I wanted to do with the archive. One was, I really wanted to give a western audience a real sense of what it was like to watch it, and how intensive it was, and it’s really hard for you to understand unless you speak fluent Japanese, because there’s so much stuff on screen and so much audio going on. It’s a cacophony of noise and mayhem. All we had was what went out on air, we didn’t have the rushes, we just had this flattened image to work with. So we had this amazing VFX artist called Jason Martin, who painstakingly managed to strip off or hide a lot of the Japanese graphics. Then we created these English graphics that were as accurate, typeface wise, as we could possibly get, so that you get this immediate effect. Fred Armisen did a fantastic job of narrating that footage.
Part of the journey I think the audience needs to go on is to actually laugh at him, and then feel bad about laughing. That’s a weird journey that I wanted the audience to go on. And so although we recreated that experience so you get a sense of how intense it is and how crass it is, we also wanted to do the opposite, and get a sense of what it was like for him to be in the room alone, without any of the graphics and noise and everything over the top.
We did that so that the audience could get a real sense of the loneliness.
I think that the footage is so important to portray that he is just alone in a room, and a lot of the time that text and those graphics and all the sound effects, they’re so manipulative for an audience. And I think partially that’s, or at least in my reading of it, due to the producer, Toshio Tsuchiya, who is usually enjoying the cruelty that he inflicts on Nasubi. How did it feel meeting him and working with him?
I first met him, actually, in London. I spoke to him, and I said, you know this is for a western audience, and you know they’re going to interpret it in a certain way, and you know they might not feel the same way that you do about things. And actually, he’s not daft, he’s a filmmaker himself, he knows how he might come across. He seemed less concerned about that. But what was interesting, when I said that there might be a bit of backlash and criticism for Denpa Shōnen, he said, well, in Japan, we would never do anything as cruel as Love Island. He had a point in the sense that at the time that I met him, there were two suicides related to Love Island, it was incredibly controversial. It does make you question how far we’ve really come in the reality TV world.
I am incredibly grateful to Tsuchiya, and I have a lot of respect for him for taking part in this film. He didn’t need to, he didn’t have to at all. And we certainly didn’t beg him or persuade him. He knew what he was getting into, he didn’t do it reluctantly. He was really honest and forthcoming and accommodating and supportive, and for that, I’m grateful and quite respectful of him.
And that comes across because he’s very blunt about what he was doing and his perspective and it adds so much to the story, to really know who’s pulling the strings. In his childhood, Nasubi used humour as a defence against bullying, which is then used by the show producers, but later he becomes a humanitarian, he leans into it, and uses his status for good.
I think he’s very admirable in that way. One of the messages that he’s been making sure that he puts across in Q&A’s and talking to people on this tour of festivals, is that you can’t change your past, but you can change the way you react to it, and the way you go forward in the future. And he’s right, particularly because he didn’t come out of there with any support, there was no counselling, so he’s had to fumble his own way through things, and he’s done it quite incredibly, really.
I remember talking about his character, and we said that Nasubi is like a diamond, in the sense that the more pressure he gets put on him, the stronger he becomes. It’s quite incredible. Most people would break and then build themselves back up again. He just seems to get stronger and more positive.
You touched on how he had no support, and his family became a huge part of rebuilding his life after the show. How did you get such incredible access to his family? How did they feel being involved?
It was quite an emotional thing. I was quite anxious about filming his family, because they hadn’t spoken about it at all. It was interesting following their journey as well, because both his parents had been anti the entertainment industry. When he came out of Denpa Shōnen he was quite broken, and I think his mum had this realisation that this was incredibly important to him, not necessarily the style of show that Denpa Shōnen was, but she made a real effort to go and see all his theatre plays in Tokyo after that. When he did climb Everest, she was there to wave him off at the train station every single time and then followed it intensely.
What was brilliant was when we came to make this film, we were looking for archive footage of Nasubi on television over his entire career, not just Denpa Shōnen, and it’s quite difficult to find archive footage in Japan. And wonderfully, his mum had painstakingly recorded every single time he was on television, and then written down on every single VHS tape that she’d recorded exactly what it was and what program and the date and everything. She had this scrapbook, if you like, of VHS tapes of every time that he’d been on television. So while she was disapproving of it on the outside, certainly, to start with, she was a great supporter of his, and I think she’s very proud of him.
That’s beautiful. Has she seen the documentary?
Yes, and not only has she seen it, but his mum and his sister came out to New York in November for a special screening. It was really lovely to show them, and for them to be able to share in all of that excitement and attention that Nasubi was getting. It was lovely for them to be able to feel the love in the room, especially for their son/brother, who had been ridiculed, really, in Japan. He got a standing ovation and everybody was applauding, and for them to be in the room and be a part of that was really, really special.
Wow. Do you think that that’s been healing for them, and also Nasubi?
I think it’s hard for me. I don’t want to speak on their behalf, but I think in some way it must have been cathartic. It feels like it’s a story that’s coming full circle. You know, I think that they’re getting a bit of closure.
And he also gets to finally tell his side of the story. How’s that felt for him and what’s your relationship been like through that process?
I feel he has found it cathartic. We have a funny relationship, because we don’t speak each other’s language, so we communicate a lot via emoji and translator tools and things. I told him several times before the film came out that people are going to really warm to him, and they’re going to love his story, and they’re going to really like him. And I don’t think he believed me at all, and he was a bit blasé about it all. So when we first screened it in Toronto and then in New York, he was quite blown away by it. He goes into screenings now not with this sense of trepidation about what they are going to think of him, I think he goes in there feeling confident and positive, which is brilliant.
Wow. That’s fantastic. And, you’ve talked about it a bit, but what has the reception from the world been like?
It’s been lovely. Actually, it’s been fantastic. When you work on something for such a long time, you can’t imagine what it’s going to be like, releasing it to audiences. Your family and friends say, you still working on that Japanese film? And then finally, it’s out there in the world.
It’s been particularly fantastic in Australia, actually, I felt a real warmth towards him. I think audiences here really get the cultural thing as well. Maybe the proximity to Japan, Japanese culture seems much more integrated in Australian culture than it is, certainly in the US and the UK. There’s a stronger connection between the two countries, I really sense that.
There’s certain questions that you get asked in the states that haven’t been asked at all here. People in America all want to know why he didn’t walk out the room and why he didn’t leave, or why other people didn’t stand up and barge their way into the TV studio. Whereas not one person’s asked that here, they seem to understand the reasons, and also maybe the cultural sensibilities around that as well.
I think we have a lot of cruel television as well, and we love an underdog. But I mean, do you think though that The Truman Show comparisons are getting a bit old, because I’m seeing them everywhere
What’s really interesting is that Denpa Shōnen came out before The Truman Show had actually been released, which is crazy. The story that I love is that Nasubi came out of Denpa Shōnen in early 1999 I think it was, and back then, a film would come out in the cinema in the US, and then eventually come out in the UK, then maybe in Australia, and then eventually in Japan. So he went to go and watch it by himself in his local cinema in Fukushima, and was slightly blown away. He was sort of looking around, wondering if people were watching him. They created this film and it was so similar to his experience in so many ways.
Gosh, that’s a lot. And if you can say, do you know what’s next for you?
I can’t say at the moment, because I’ve got a number of things that I’m juggling, and each week you don’t know which one’s going to happen, but they’re quite exciting.
by Parker C. Constantine
The Contestant
Sydney Film Festval