Where Are Nasubi and Toshio Tsuchiya from Hulu’s ‘The Contestant’ Doc Now?

To say that the new Hulu documentary, The Contestant, is a wild ride is a severe understatement. Directed by British filmmaker Clair Titley, The Contestant recounts the story of Tomoaki “Nasubi” Hamatsu, who, in 1998, became the star of a Japanese reality series that stripped him down naked and starved him on national television.

The reality series was called Denpa Shōnen: A Life in Prizes, and the premise featured Nasubi—a childhood nickname that translates to”eggplant”— trapped in a small studio apartment, with no food or clothing. He had a rack of magazines, and a stack of postcards, and was instructed to enter as many sweepstake contests as he could, to see if man could “live on prizes alone.” He endure the “game” for 15 months, before he was finally told he had won enough prizes to win and go home.

The grand finale found Nasubi naked in front of a live studio announced, shocked by the knowledge that he was a famous figure in Japan. He knew he was being filmed, but he’d been told by Denpa Shōnen producer Toshio Tsuchiya that the footage would likely never air.  Without his consent, he had become a media sensation, watched by over 15 million viewers.

The Contestant features both Nasubi and Tsuchiya reflecting on the show, now over 25 years later. Here’s here Nasubi and Tsuchiya from The Contestant are today.

Where is Toshio Tsuchiya from The Contestant now?

Toshio Tsuchiya—the aka the producer in The Contestant who was the mastermind behind the Denpa Shonen segment that tormented Nasubi—is still working in the Japanese entertainment industry as producer today. He’s sometimes referred as “Director T” or “Manager T.”

In 2017, Tsuchiya directed and was featured in the documentary We Love Television?, about the culture of Japanese TV. According a report from Variety, in 2019 Tsuchiya worked with the Japanese public broadcaster NHK and Japanese private sector firm Rhizomatiks to create a virtual reality experience called “The Time Machine,” which took users back to the 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo. So clearly, he’s still working. He never faced any legal or criminal action for A Life In Prizes, and indeed has expressed little to no regret for doing the show.

Quite the opposite in fact. Tsuchiya is featured in the Hulu documentary, and speaks with gleeful pride as he describes starving, isolating, and humiliating Nasubi for the sake of his television show. In a Decider interview with the director of The Contestant, British filmmaker Clair Titley said, “[Tsuchiya] doesn’t express regret in the way that we would like him to, or the way in which we expect him to. Whether that’s a cultural thing, or whether that’s just a Tsuchiya thing, it’s hard to tell. Strangely, his biggest ‘apology,’ in inverted commas, is him taking part in the film itself.”

Titley added that there was no question that Tsuchiya was unwilling to answer. “I actually have a lot of respect and admiration for him, at how brave he was at taking part in this film, without any caveats, or anything,” she said.

Where is Nasubi from The Contestant now?

As you see at the end of The Contestant, Nasubi, who is now 48, moved back to his hometown of Fukushima, Japan, to join the relief efforts after the city was devastated by an earthquake and tsunami, and resulting radioactive damage from a nuclear plant, in 2011. Though he was famous from Denpa Shonen, he was struggling to make it as an actor or a comedian. (As Nasubi says in the doc, the traumatizing experience on the reality show hardly prepared him for a comedy career.) But, Nasubi says, he found meaning in using his celebrity status to bring comfort to the people of his hometown.

Then Nasubi found a new challenge to endure: He wanted to climb Mt. Everest, and dedicate his climb to the people of Fukushima. But on his first attempt to climb, the group endured a fatal avalanche, that killed 19 people. Nasubi survived, stayed on the mountain for many weeks to help rescue others, and then was determined to try again. But after spending his life savings on the first expedition, he couldn’t afford to pay his way again. Then Tsuchiya reached out to Nasubi, and the producer told him he wanted to help.

“When the Fukushima [earthquake] happened I was struggling, it was a hard time. And he’s about the only person that actually reached out and helped the situation,” Nasubi told Decider, in an in-person interview that was conducted via a translator. “So, I was very surprised. I was stunned at how much he could change.”

Though Tsuchiya still expressed no regret for his decision to make the show, he does say he feels bad for the suffering that Nasubi endured on Denpa Shonen. He says in the documentary that if Nasubi asked him to die in order to get closure, he would consider it. But Nasubi didn’t ask for that, nor did he even ask directly for money. Instead he asked for Tsuchiya’s help to crowdfund his next Mt. Everest expedition. Tsuchiya did help, and Nasubi made it to the top of Everest, once again dedicating his climb to the people of Fukushima.

“Helping people in the Fukushima situation helped me,” Nasubi told Decider. “In the beginning, what I lost was way bigger, but as the time goes, the things that I have gained, got bigger and bigger.”

You can follow Nasubi and his work on his social media accounts, on X and Instagram.