In the new documentary The Contestant, a Japanese man is put through an astonishing TV experience for more than a year

When Tomoaki Hamatsu, an aspiring comedian from the Japanese province of Fukushima, auditioned for the reality show Susunu! Denpa Shōnen in January 1998, he arrived with zero expectations and a dream for some fame. Reality television was still in its wild west infancy – no contracts, no protections, still just a handful of home-grown personalities. The new frontier of reality celebrity was just opening up, and Hamatsu, who went by the childhood nickname Nasubi – the Japanese word for eggplant, owing to his long face – saw an opportunity. His only boundary was a request from his mother: “Don’t get naked.”

As captured by the show’s producers and now reassembled in the remarkable new Hulu documentary The Contestant, a young Nasubi – short hair, wide and near-blinding smile – “won” the audition with the right lottery ticket. His prize? A stranger-than-fiction 15-month ordeal and groundbreaking national celebrity. Not that Nasubi was aware of it, at the time; he was escorted straight from the audition, blindfolded, to a studio apartment in Tokyo furnished with nothing but a camera, a table, a radio, a phone, a cushion and a full magazine rack. Ordered to strip naked, Nasubi tentatively undressed, still hamming for the camera. His assignment was to obtain everything he needed (clothes, food, entertainment) via magazine sweepstakes contests, until he won the equivalent of one million yen ($8,000).