The Silent Reading List #4

DENPA SHOUNEN (1998) - Nasubi Prize Life Contest - Part 1

DENPA SHOUNEN (1999) - Nasubi Prize Life Contest - Part 2

Sorry, I stopped paying attention and missed Sunday. This is an extremely interesting example not just of Japanese television, but of Japanese television of this era (late '90s - early '00s).

I'm not necessarily qualified to speak about this at length, so I'll do some paraphrasing, but there is a great Wikipedia article and a writeup on Tofugu, blog posts, etc. This really captured the eye of people in the west. These all do a better job of explaining than I am, so please feel free to read them after you've watched. This was very roughly subbed for many years, but back in 2016 they were blessedly redone by /u/iiharima.

"Nasubi's Prize Life" (from the show Susunu! Denpa Shonen) is a form of Galapagos entertainment: like the species on the islands, it could not exist before, since, or anywhere else. The premise is that a young amateur comedian hoping to break out was selected and confined to a small apartment, stripped of all his belongings, including his clothing, and instructed to survive with only the items he could win from magazine sweepstakes, and that he couldn't leave until he accrued 1,000,000 yen's worth of prizes. This comedian was named Nasubi ("eggplant," from the shape of his face).

It's undeniably entertaining. Over the 15-month run of the show it averaged 17 million viewers. There was even an online live-stream component (in the '90s!). A strange and thrilling thing to watch, it's almost uncomfortably intimate. Nasubi had no idea that everyone in Japan was watching him, he was completely isolated for the whole run. Stepping back from the whacky-TV-premise mentality and imagining what life must have been like for someone with no social contact for over a year, the saccharine-sweet narration and carefully-chosen clips start to take on a sinister tone.

This type of content was deemed exploitative and immoral enough (not just Denpa Shounen but other shows and concepts as well) that there was apparently a shift in broadcast regulations. I'm still looking for a source on this, so that could be apocryphal, or some kind of dream I had.

It's impossible not to fall in love with Nasubi. I won't spoil anything here, but he goes through some incredible things, and there's a natural sine wave progression that you follow him on as he gets more or less desirable prizes (food is always a peak). You'll have to decide how you feel about his treatment. How much of what you're watching is real, did they really not give him any food during the dry spells, was he really so isolated? Is this a moral way to treat a human being for entertainment purposes?

DENPA SHOUNEN (1998) - Nasubi Prize Life Contest - Part 1 

DENPA SHOUNEN (1999) - Nasubi Prize Life Contest - Part 2