Nasubi, The Naked Eggplant-Man Who Lived Off Sweepstakes

http://www.tofugu.com/2014/01/07/nasubi-the-naked-eggplant-man-who-lived-off-sweepstakes/

by danso • 12 years ago

38 21 12 years ago

chunkiestbacon• 12 years ago

horrible, absolutely horrible

brownbat2• 12 years ago

This American Life featured interviews with Tomoaki Hamatsu (the "contestant") and his producer recently:

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/529/t...

Their interviews provide additional details. Apparently the producers did feed him during the first two weeks, but only bread and water. Hamatsu did eventually have to eat dogfood. He was really forced to live naked, to the point where after the ordeal, clothes were itchy and uncomfortable, required a lot of readjusting. He was bullied into continuing when he wanted to quit.

EDIT: If Milgrim or Zimbardo were getting started today, they wouldn't be able to do any of their early work at Universities, because of ethics panels that set strict guidelines covering human subject research. They couldn't do any of it on reality TV either, because there it would be far too tame.

pavel_lishin2• 12 years ago

What are the ethics of doing research on reality TV? A researcher meets a television producer at a bar, and jokingly suggests an experiment he'd like to run. The producer pitches it as a reality TV show, and it runs. Would it be ethical to use the recorded video to write the paper the researcher originally wanted to?

imgabe• 12 years ago

If it's unethical to do it as an experiment, it would be unethical to do it as a reality TV show. Experiments are unethical when they're cruel and abusive. It's not like it's ok to be cruel and abusive as long as you're filming it for entertainment.

JoeAltmaier3• 12 years ago

He volunteered. And nothing prevented him from walking out the door. Not cruel, but certainly a spectacle.

And not eating for a week or two? Many people do that - its called 'fasting' and not especially dangerous. I fast for days at a time as I see fit.

brownbat2• 12 years ago

He actually tried to quit after they blindfolded him and moved him to South Korea, but producers just argued with him until he gave up. (This is a guy who is malnourished and starting to feel the psychological affects of isolation, he probably wasn't the hardest person to bend to the producers' will.)

He could have ignored them, stumbled naked into the streets of a foreign country and tried to beg for help, maybe using some form of pantomime.

Not literal locks and chains, but in the beginning, he probably didn't know what to expect, and by the end of the series, there was some strong psychological pressure keeping him there.

JoeAltmaier3• 12 years ago

And still it was his choice. Hard to ignore the strong enticement of fame and fortune (whether he was right about that or not).

keithpeter• 12 years ago

"He could have ignored them, stumbled naked into the streets of a foreign country and tried to beg for help, maybe using some form of pantomime."

Leading, no doubt, to arrest, the summoning of an interpreter, and the extreme embarrassment if not prosecution of the producer or representative in SK of the show.

Seriously everyone: he must have gone through passport control in two countries to get to SK. I doubt if they let passengers through unclothed.

simon_• 12 years ago

The year-long isolation seems to me like a much crueler part of the ordeal than anything food related. We consider it inhumane to do this to convicted murderers, even when they have interactions with guards and activity time that make them much less isolated than "Nasubi" seems to have been.

cmdrfred• 12 years ago

If I was in change of a sweepstakes and saw his name come up I'd rig the contest somehow. Poor guy.

jvandonsel• 12 years ago

How is this hacker news?

recursive• 12 years ago

It received enough positive votes.

mccr8• 12 years ago

This article is pretty bad. "Japan is weird! Some weird and horrible stuff happened... or did it?"

Theodores• 12 years ago

Around the time this TV series aired competitions fundamentally changed in the UK.

If we go back to the days before the internet it was possible for a competition to ask a difficult question that you couldn't 'just Google'. You would have to have the breadth and depth of 'General Knowledge' or you would need to make a trip to somewhere like the library to look up the answer. This made it so that some prizes were 'deserved', imagine you had some novelty item signed by some famous sports-person, you would have to know something about that sport to enter, consequently there was reward for those that knew their stuff.

Tie-breaker questions were also quite common, as in 'complete in less than 25 words: I use the product coz...'

Then something changed with how the competitions were 'paid for'. In the days of postcards the prize came from some sponsor, the TV production crew sifted the cards and found the ones with the correct answers, then picked out some quality tiebreaker.

So then it changed to phone lines and TXT messages. Clearly it now cost money to enter, albeit that cost being a premium rate phone number - '0898' numbers etc. Money was made off the phones, even if notionally a 'national rate' call. So the answers were 'a', 'b', 'c' with questions requiring less thought than you would think possible, e.g. for the Tour de France show a bike would be the prize and the question being 'How many wheels does a two-wheeled bicycle have?' a) 2, b) 25, c) 27.

Behind the scenes the phone lines and the organisation of the competition would be out-sourced to a company with no involvement in the production of the show. The revenue from the phone competition would be enough to cover the production costs of the show and the prize would be something the producers had acquired for free anyway.

At least in the UK it is now not really that possible to live off competition winnings, as per Eggplant Man. Quality competitions have gone and the relationship between reader/viewer and those setting the competition has completely changed. Some things (but not many) were better before the internet.

mukyu• 12 years ago

I've actually looked for recordings of this show several times over the years, but sadly have only turned up short clips.

Seems I missed it being put up on Hulu at one point, but you can find some of it now (sometimes even subtitled in English).

http://vimeo.com/49589381

http://vimeo.com/53656752

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sc6kuxHbDk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SUONIiWLjs