The Reality TV Experiment: Nasubi

This is the sixth part of Tomoaki Hamatsu’s story, I strongly recommend you start at the beginning here to learn the full story.

Resume: Tomoaki Hamatsu was randomly selected to participate in "Denpa Shōnen Teki Kenshō Seikatsu", roughly translating to “The Crazy Youth Prize Life.” The show's premise, “Can someone live only by rewards in Japan and Korea?” brought Tomoaki Hamatsu, nicknamed Nasubi, to a perilous living situation for 15 months. In 2020, his story became relevant again to the international public at the peak of the COVID-19 epidemic. Here is the story of Nasubi.

After the show, Nasubi returned to his hometown, in the Fukushima Prefecture, and laid low on the international scene. He was brought back to the international scene in 2020, as the lockdown affected Japanese and international citizens.

The Lockdown

During the lockdown, Tomoaki Hamatsu posted an encouraging message for lockdown-affected areas on Twitter (now, X). He shortly explained his previous experience in lockdown and encouraged citizens to follow the government's guidelines: "If I can do it, you can do it!!" He added to this positive message two pictures of himself with his 1998 diary in one hand and the VHS of his experience in the other.

Rough translation: "In short, I would like to inform everyone who has been watching the sweepstakes life! I don't say it's a year or three months, I hope it's a month, but even if it's impossible for a month in general, why don't you stay at home for a week or ten days? Since I was able to do it, you can do it too!!"

Following this post, he would be interviewed by Style Koriyama, a free magazine from the Fukushima Prefecture, and Buzzfeed Japan, where he described his experience with the extreme lockdown he endured: "Although I looked like I was having fun most of the time on the edited show, to me, it was full of pain," he said to Style Koriyama. "It was really hard, and I was pushed mentally. I wondered why I had to go through such painful feelings alone. To be honest, I was in such an extreme state that I considered suicide many times", he said to Buzzfeed Japan. "I read in a book after my life as a prizewinner that a punishment worse than the death penalty is to be locked in a small room and forced to do simple tasks over and over again," he added.

These interviews cast a dark light on the once-beloved show while renewing the attention around Nasubi’s challenge and the series.

The Denpa Shōnen series

On Nippon TV, the late-night timeslot (22:00-23:00) was given consistently to the "Denpa Shōnen" from 1992 to 2010, but the series would reach its golden age in the 1990s. Nasubi's challenge was aired as the beginning of "Susunu! Denpa Shōnen" (roughly translating to "Advance! Crazy Youth"), which aired from January 11, 1998, to September 29, 2002. The series mainly capitalizes on the hopes of undiscovered comedians reaching for their piece of the cake. At what price?

"The program is widely recognized as a legendary variety show that is unparalleled in television history, in which the cast members challenged themselves to various reckless acts [...], and often involved dangerous locations that endangered the lives of the performers and the program itself." As most of the series is lost, it's impossible to compare Nasubi's challenge to the previous and subsequent challenges: we can only rely on the remaining descriptions of each episode, which are uncommon nonetheless.

And that was the end of my research on Nasubi’s challenge. Well, that’s what I presumed, and I was wrong. A new light will be brought to Nasubi’s story a few years later...

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To be continued