Clair Titley’s ‘The Contestant’ reveals the horror behind the Japanese reality TV show that shocked the world. For 15 months, Nasubi was left naked in a small room and challenged to win his basic needs, such as food and clothes, by entering magazines competition sweepstakes.
Unbeknownst to him, his challenge was being aired on national TV in real time. The documentary lays bare the devastating emotional toll that the show had on Nasubi and questions the actions of the producers involved. Titley speaks to us about uncovering the raw, emotional truth behind the edits, the complex effects of coercive control in media and the difficulties of shooting a documentary in lockdown.
This is such a shocking subject and at times feels so surreal. How did you first find out about it and how did you begin the process of starting the documentary?
I found out about the story and about Susunu! Denpa Shōnen when I was working on another project. I was doing some research and got caught down one of those internet rabbit holes! As I looked into it more, I couldn’t get my head around the fact that nobody had really delved into Nasubi’s story that much. I felt that it was very ‘point and laugh at the Japanese’ and a lot of coverage was quite lazy in its analysis. I really wanted to know how Nasubi had dealt with it and how he had come through the other side rather than the story just ending the moment that he was released back into the world.
I started a conversation with Nasubi, told him about the approach that I wanted to take, and he was really on board. He was the one, actually, who said, “let’s just make this happen, Clair”. So he came over to the UK and we shot a tester tape—we also had a bit of a crazy holiday, visiting the Isle of Wight and Stonehenge and taking the time to just talk and to unpack everything.
How do you navigate the interview process for something like this?
One thing that we did with both Nasubi and Tsuchiya was that we didn’t hold back at all in our interviews, and they were both very aware of that going into the project. Nasubi was very happy about that. He wanted in. He wanted this to be the time when he told his life story. We had two full days of interviews with him and at the end of the second day, he said, “well, obviously, we’ve gotta keep going for two more days”. There was so much more to say.
With Tsuchiya, it would have been almost disrespectful not to have pushed him and asked him everything that we did because he’s also a filmmaker, he makes documentaries as well as the shows on Denpa Shōnen. He expected to be challenged, so there was no holding back. We even asked him if he felt like he was playing God, and he kind of laughed it off and said, “oh, I wasn’t playing God. I was playing the devil”.
The film sets up quite a strong victim and villain dichotomy between Nasubi and Tsuchiya, did you always plan for the film to take this route or did it begin to unfold as you started interviewing them?
I knew that they were going to be the two lead characters. When we started out I thought of it as a sort of reverse buddy movie because, in some ways, the film is all about their relationship. However, it was only when we’d started filming and were doing the final bits of research for the interviews that we realised the similarities between the two of them. They both grew up with their fathers being police officers, both of them travelled around a lot, they had quite similar strict upbringings. They went in different directions, and then found themselves together in this unusual symbiotic relationship.
I don’t know if I would, but some people have compared their relationship to a kidnapper and their victim. I don’t know if I’d call it that, but there’s something in it. However, Tsuchiya is very supportive of everything that Nasubi does. There’s also a group of ex-Denpa Shōnen participants and he very quietly, without mentioning it, supports them all. Tsuchiya doesn’t talk about that at all. I just know this through Nasubi and other contacts.
Do you think there is an element of guilt to Tsuchiya giving all of this support in the background?
It’s really hard for me to say. I don’t want to put words in Tsuchiya’s mouth and he hasn’t said it in those terms. I think he feels a duty, I know he feels a duty, to support Nasubi. He’s unusual in his apology, or lack of apology, but I think it’s just quite different to how we might see things. We can be quite black and white: “He did wrong, and he needs to apologise.” I think he is atoning, but in a more unusual, quiet way.
What were some of the biggest challenges during the interview process?
We ended up shooting this during COVID. I was working very closely with one of the producers, Megumi Inman, and we always had this plan of preparing and conducting the interviews together. I strongly believe that people need to look you in the eyes during an interview, and because I don’t speak good enough Japanese I knew that it was always going to be the case that I would be a little bit behind the camera and Megumi would speak to the subjects directly, face-to-face. However, Japan was incredibly strict and wasn’t letting people into the country.
I ended up doing all the shoots remotely from the shed at the bottom of my garden. It was mad, I put myself on Japan time for five or six weeks. My daughter would come in from school and put me to bed! Before the shoot, Megumi also had to do two weeks of quarantine when she landed in Japan. It was very meta, because she had to do it in a small hotel room with limited access to the outside world. It would just be the two of us on video calls talking through the characters and our beliefs about interviews and how we approach them. We had all this time where nobody was interrupting us, so by the time the interviews came about, even though I was several thousand miles away, I felt like I was in the room. I connected with the crew and I trusted everything Megumi did. We became the same person. There’s some brilliant, production stills of them carrying me around on a computer screen as a kind of floating head. It was an unusual way to direct and I wouldn’t choose to do it again, but sometimes you can turn a disadvantage into an advantage.
A point of frustration is that there is a sense of mystery over Nasubi’s decision to endure the competition—we learn in the documentary that he could have left at any time. Was there ever a discussion as to why he persisted for so long and what he wished to gain?
Nasubi and I have had endless discussions about this, and it’s really hard to get it across because it’s not just one thing. It would have been very easy editorially for me to say, “the reason he didn’t leave was because of X”. If there had just been one reason, it would have just taken one thing to snap him out of it and he’d have walked out the door. But life isn’t like that.
At first, I think it started off with tiny reasons. One of them is his character, he said that he would do it, and he wanted to see it through. He also thought it could lead to something. He didn’t have the history of reality TV that we do, he was a proper country bumpkin in his early twenties, really naive and super trusting. Then at some point along the way, it’s like he forgot the reason he was there and that he could leave.
In the film there is a lot of talk about ‘the edit’ and the power production has to influence perceptions of characters and events. Is this something you, as a documentary film-maker, were concerned about here? Do you see a relationship between reality television and the medium of documentary film-making?
I think that we’re all interested in the manipulation of media and the power that it can have. Tsuchiya is fascinated by this as well. I suppose the difference between reality TV and documentary is that in reality TV you’re not necessarily striving for truth. In documentary, we do. If we’re gonna be all Grierson about it, his definition of documentary was “the creative treatment of actuality”. You’re aware as a documentary filmmaker that you’re manipulating material and that you are putting across different points, but you’re aiming for some kind of truth.
In reality TV, they’re striving for entertainment. We were really hindered by the fact that we didn’t have the rushes from the original show, we only had what went out on air. The problem with that is that it’s so heavily manipulated, it’s got all this music and FX and graphics over the top. You don’t actually ever get to see the raw footage, just Nasubi alone. One of the technical things that our amazing VFX artist, Jason Martine, did was strip all of that back. He painted out and removed all the VFX and replaced the soundtrack entirely, and we created what we referred to as ‘fake rushes’—editing to get back to the ‘natural’.
You’re always putting on a lens of sorts. We were trying to boil down a story that took place over 15 months into 90 minutes so you always have that challenge.
I was also very aware of the fact that I’m a Westerner making a film about a different culture’s media. I’ve seen that before so many times. I think people sometimes fall into the trap of being quite patronising or trying to look at it too much through our own lens. So I was just very aware of that as well.
The documentary takes quite a hands-off approach, letting the story and characters speak for themselves. That said, what is the message that you hope people take away from the film?
Everybody does come away from the documentary thinking about it differently. When I screened the film in Canada, a woman came up to me and she said, “you’ve made such a powerful film for domestic violence victims”. I went, “have I?” And she said, “Oh, yeah. It’s a film all about coercive control”.
I would really love for audiences to kinda reflect on their own relationship with media, with reality TV, with social media. We’re living in an age where we all share our information and our likeness willingly, and then there’s Nasubi, who was doing that unaware. I’d love for people to come away reflecting on the difference there.
We all have completely different experiences of media. The history of all these kinds of things is so short; you can have just a couple of years’ difference in age with somebody, and they’ll have had a totally different experience with social media or reality TV and had their worldview shaped by that. I hope that people get a chance to question their relationship with that and to question how complicit we all are in it.
Words by Kit Gullis
The Contestant is previewing in cinemas from 27 November before being released nationwide on 29 November.
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