Dateline: TV Squad

Desperate for news much?

Yea, good luck trying to find a legitimate cash giveaway, must have been fixed to bring credibility to these criminals. Remember publishers clearing house pushed by Ed McMahon for years? Got busted big time for being a scam. No free lunches in this world. Next big bust should be anti-viral software pushed by Microsoft themselves who creates the holes in the first place so they can sell you more things. Damn windows doesn't ever work right and their busy making all kinds of other stuff that probably doesn't work either unless its a game, its all a big game! Tired of them all!

Reading the story by Ed Jacob is the equivalent of reading a story about a guy getting tossed out of an airplane and it taking several months for him to hit the ground. It's not physically possible - it only takes a few minutes for an object to freefall and go splat, and no TV show or contest in the world can change natural law. There's no way a person could survive, much less later be in "perfect health" for more than a few days without water, and only about a week or so without food. There's no mention of water at all in the story. Not to mention waste disposal habits. And the guy would have had to have been a complete lunatic to endure any of it without knowing what was going on. I don't believe a word of it, sorry.

All I have to say is wow. The depths of human suffering will always be prey for entertainment, I guess. This is just a modern day version of fighting to the death in the Coliseum.

The show in question isn't around anymore.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasubi
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susunu%21_Denpa_Sh%C5%8Dnen

NASUBI - By Ed Jacob

Nippon Television's (NTV) producers have obviously never heard of the Geneva Convention. If they had, they wouldn't have treated poor Nasubi the way they did. They wouldn't have stripped him naked and shut him in an apartment, alone with no food, furniture, household goods, or entertainment. They wouldn't have kept him there for over a year until he had won $10 000 in prizes by sending in postcards to contests. They wouldn't have cut him off from the world and they would have told him that he was on nation-wide TV.

It all started one snowy day in January, 1998 with an audition. The audition consisted of choosing lots because the only talent needed for this challenge was luck. A group of aspiring comedians showed up, and among them was a young man whose stage name is Nasubi, which means eggplant. Nasubi was 'lucky' that day, and was chosen over other aspiring young comedians for a mysterious "show-business related job". He was immediately blindfolded and driven to a tiny one room apartment somewhere in Tokyo.

When he arrived at the apartment, he was shown a stand full of magazines, a huge pile of postcards, and told to strip naked. The room was empty except for a cushion, a table, a small radio, a telephone, some notebooks, and a few pens. There was not a crumb of food, a square of toilet paper, or any form of entertainment. Whatever he needed, he was to win by sending thousands of postcards into contests. The producers left and Nasubi was on his own in his unique survival challenge. Imagine what was going through his mind: How am I going to eat? Why are they doing this to me? How long will it take to get out of here? He must have thought he was in a bad episode of The Prisoner.



Nasubi won his first contest on February 8th. He got some jelly, a 1560 yen value, leaving him with 998 440 yen left to win. That day, he ate food for the first time in two weeks! On February 22nd, he won a 5 kg bag of rice. Unfortunately, he had no cooking utensils. At first he tried eating it raw, but eventually devised a cooking method where he put it in an empty can beside a burner for an hour until it was "cooked". He ate about a half cup of rice a day using two pens for chopsticks.

Life was tough for Nasubi--he was obviously lonely, uncomfortable and bored but he seemed to be continually cheerful in the face of adversity. Putting on a bold face when one is suffering is one of the most admired traits in Japan and this was a big reason for the program's incredible popularity. He spent his days writing postcards, and sent out between 3000 and 8000 a month! It must have been incredibly discouraging because by the end of March, he had only won 66,840 yen, leaving him with 933,160 yen left to win.



Every time Nasubi won a contest, he did a victory dance and made up a strange song about the prize he had won and how happy he was. You've never seen anyone's face light up the way Nasubi's did when he heard a knock at the door or the telephone rang. In this picture below we see him celebrating after he won a poster of his favourite TV star, an attractive young woman named Ryoko Hirose. His apartment was gradually filling up and he was beginning to live something resembling a human life. Of course there were some bad moments too, especially the day he won a TV but realized his apartment had no antennae or cable!



A doctor's visit in May, after five months in the room, revealed Nasubi to be in perfect health! No scurvy, no fleas or lice, and no signs of malnutrition. He had lost a lot of weight, and his ribs were showing through his skin, but his blood tests and a physical examination revealed no other problems. His fingernails had grown to several inches long and his hair and beard were getting rather unmanageable by that time, but they were annoyances rather than dangers. It's incredible what the human body can survive and how resilient people are. Who would have thought that it was possible to live like that?

Near the end of May, Nasubi's rice ran out, and he was reduced to eating dog food. It was heart wrenching seeing him prey every night for rice.

By June, the show had become incredibly popular and the mass media had found out where Nasubi was staying. In the middle of the night, he was awakened by a producer with a flashlight, blindfolded and moved to a new apartment. He was told that it was to "change his luck" but the real reason was that the producers were worried he would find out that the entire nation was watching him. Unfortunately, the people who moved his things to the new apartment forgot to bring his rice! One of the few times we got to see Nasubi really angry was when he said, "How could you forget my rice??? How could you? Don't you know how important my rice is?" He seemed to be on the point of breaking. January 10 2008 at 1:46 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

god forbid you actually do any research on an item you are writing...

"what did this guy eat for a year? pencils"

mainly rice he won through mail in contests... sometimes resorting to dog food

"A new television show from Japan has a...."

show is nearly 10 years old and the part you are referring to was taped/aired 5 years ago

This happened in 1998. Why is this being reported as news?

This is hardly 'new'. This format has been around for at least 15 years.

I don't think it's any more appalling or "bottom-feeding" than American reality junk. At least the Japanese are being honest about how lowbrow reality tv really is. Hopefully crap like this spells the beginning of the end for reality tv although somehow I fear it won't.