in the late 90s a very popular japanese game show tortured a man for a year and broadcast it every sunday night this isn't like reality tv where it's all fake and scripted not to ruin christmas for all the believers out there this was legitimately torturing another human being for the sake of entertainment and it was extremely popular averaging 17 million viewers every sunday night that they'd played the clips that's absolutely massive even by today's standards it's more viewers than the last four years of the nba finals and the world series and obviously more than most
television shows get for reference the boys season premiere got around 8 million viewers and according to youtuber atrocity guide who also covered the story the most viewed episode of game of thrones got around 16 million viewers so it even beats that just an absolutely massive success but it doesn't stop there the producers knew there was still a little milk left in those teats and they wanted to suckle so they actually turned it from just a weekly broadcast into a full-blown live stream where you could log on online and watch him suffer in real time so
whenever you're just feeling particularly quirky you could hop in there and watch a man be miserably tortured for the better part of a year doesn't that sound like fun what a great way of starting the day a nice bowl of cereal and milk for breakfast and watching a man's sanity slowly deteriorate as he dances around naked in absolute agony wonderful this is the story of nasubi as i briefly mentioned another youtube channel named atrocity guide made a great video on this topic but i wanted to go even deeper so we caleb chelsea and i really
did a [ __ ] thorough deep dive spreading the foul cheeks of this situation wide open going through live streams all of the broadcast clips in order to really get a handle on just how vile this whole thing was so let's begin in 1998 a popular japanese game show named susanu dimpa shonen held a raffle to find their next contestant for an upcoming show they were working on called a life of prizes nisubi ended up winning the lottery and was ecstatic he believed this was going to be a big break for him since he was
also an up-and-coming comedian and he was escorted to a small apartment where he was then instructed to take off all of his clothes in order to participate in the game the challenge was he would have to survive in this apartment on nothing but his winnings from sweepstakes they only provided him with water and he was told that he would not be allowed to leave or communicate with the outside world or have any access to anything that he didn't directly earn through magazine sweepstakes he was told that he'd need to win 1 million yen which at
the time 1998 was right around 8 000 us dollars through only mail-in magazine sweepstakes in order to complete the challenge and be released from the room and yes this does include food they didn't provide him with any food the only food he'd have access to is the food that he earns through mail-in sweepstakes it just feels like there were better odds of a bird carrying ten thousand dollars in its mouth crashing through the apartment window than actually earning 10 grand through mail-in sweepstakes this [ __ ] is like something you would actually hear of like
[ __ ] up prison guards at guantanamo bay doing as like a joke or something it's so cruel and brutally difficult but nasubi did actually pull it off it took nasubi 335 days total to finally make enough money to be released from it or at least so you'd think this is actually only the tip of the iceberg here but i just want to give you the story in a nutshell and i also want to explain the name nasubi because that's not actually the contestant's real name his actual name is tomowaki hamatsu the name nasubi actually
means eggplant and he got this because the producers used an eggplant to censor his genitals for the broadcast and they also said that his head resembled the shape of an eggplant the whole point of the susanoo din pashonen broadcast here was to laugh at nasubi and people were 17 million people having an old hoot and a holler a real side-splitting comedy watching a man be legitimately tortured nasubi believed that he was being recorded and that the clips were going to be re-edited and broadcast for tv so he would come in and like update people on
what he's doing like i just won this can of cat food i just won this bicycle and then he'd like dance around and try and make it entertaining but he never knew that he was being live streamed the whole time he was under the impression that it was just going to be moments from the challenge not that every excruciating second of this challenge was being broadcast to all of japan extremely [ __ ] situation and this is just the bare outline of it what i want to do for this video is actually go through a
lot of clips and moments from this live stream and the broadcast as well as just everything surrounding it because it is so baffling it is bizarre that this actually happened i remember vsauce did a video on what happens to the mind when you're cut off from stimulation in the outside world for an extended period of time and unsurprisingly it is so psychologically damaging to be completely alone and isolated like nusubi was and vsauce only did like a few days nisubi did over a year 15 months total natto foreign this was nasubi's first big win a
fat dubski he was able to secure 12 pots of fiber jelly i don't know what the [ __ ] fiber jelly is i've never heard of it in my life that sounds like a made-up substance in the movie snow piercer but it was huge for nasubi because it's his first bit of food since this started so he was extremely hungry and was able to get some nutrients this wasn't the first thing he applied for though the first sweepstakes he was entering were for clothing items he wanted to cover up obviously because being naked is going
to be cold uncomfortable especially since it's being filmed so he had applied for an apron first but he didn't win high [Music] obviously since nasubi was trapped in isolation cut off from the rest of the world he cherished every single knock at that door it was the only bit of human interaction he gets so he'd get excited and of course he's expecting to win something since why else would someone be knocking at the door so he gets really hyped up like hey finally something came that's going to help me get closer to completing this challenge
or maybe it's food and i'm starving but that wasn't always the case like in these two clips here sometimes it was just [ __ ] cruel where a postman knocked down his door just to let him know that he needs to put his name on the mailbox or some [ __ ] and then also someone put the wrong address for a ramen delivery so we couldn't even have the ramen after smelling it like it was just really sad to see [Applause] finally it seems fortune's looking up for nasubi here he's able to secure five kilograms
of rice but then things get heartbreaking when he realizes he has no way of cooking the rice because he'd need to win a pot from a sweepstakes in order to use it so he just has five kilograms of rice that he can't cook it's [ __ ] terrible you know like it's a treasure that you can't have so he he gets desperate and he starts resorting to eating the rice raw [Applause] [Music] foreign unable to continue eating the rice raw nasubi knew he needed to find some way to cook it so he went full [
__ ] jimmy neutron here he hatched an idea to put the rice into one of the jelly fiber containers and he put hot water in it left it out overnight hoping to make it somewhat cooked as you can see in the clip he said even if it's gruel just make it into something it didn't work at all so he came up with another plan to put it in the fiber jelly container put it in the hot water and set it next to the gas burner so that way it would kind of cook it by proxy
and this worked it was able to cook the rice and now he had an efficient way of actually eating that rice that he won't slowly but surely nasubi was chipping away at that million yen goal winning more and more prizes such as a bicycle which on the surface seems pretty useless since he couldn't take it outside but he turned it into a stationary bike and i'm sure that was like a good way of stimulating him because what the [ __ ] else are you gonna do so he'd eat his watery rice while pedaling on the
bicycle and he started gathering more and more winnings it started to look like my [ __ ] dorm room from college just a bicycle and all kinds of miscellaneous [ __ ] all over the place [Music] he also upgraded his whole cooking operation by using a pin and a can of sake he was able to create a pretty efficient cooking apparatus so he was able to make rice more efficiently he was even able to cook spaghetti now so he was really like climbing up the tech tree here by just being an absolute [ __ ]
genius and it's also worth noting some of the more useless things he won like the bicycle wasn't entirely worthless because that helped increase the value of his winnings bringing him closer to that million yen mark so even if he couldn't get a ton of usage out of it directly just having it in the in the room was beneficial because it gets him closer to being done with the challenge [Music] now it's been about two months in this clip here and according to atrocity guide nasubi submitted 5748 sweepstakes entries in the first month so you can
imagine that he's right around that 11 thousand twelve thousand sweeps sweepstake entry ballpark and he is just now winning his first article of clothing which are used panties from someone named hitomi chan i wanna say i had no idea the used panty market spanned this far back in time this is 1998. i thought soiled panties used socks and bath water were things women started selling within the last decade to take advantage of like internet sales i had no idea that this was a popular market all the way back into the 90s but anyway nisubi wins
these panties it's his only article of clothing he's won so far but they don't fit unfortunately [Music] i found this one to be extraordinarily sad so still around two months now he's had no contact with any human beings aside from the delivery guy just dropping off his winnings he wins a stuffed seal which he names binasu and takes him for a walk it's his only source of companionship that [ __ ] just breaks my heart to see i i'm not gonna lie [Music] foreign this is his first time winning a direct source of protein up
until this point his diet was mainly just the rice and like spaghetti so he'd be getting trace amounts of protein but never something like steak his macros had to be so [ __ ] from this but he finally gets steak and he cooks it by using a ballpoint pen to cook it over the direct flame and he gets to eat it and is super happy about it i'd also like to highlight something in that note he wrote he said in the life of a poor comedian he's only used the word stake in his imagination i
think this is big because prior to this challenge nisubi wasn't a popular comedian in japan he wasn't well off or anything like that he you know he this was his big break which is why he was so excited to be part of this show and then he he gets tortured it's so [ __ ] cruel like you can't help but feel absolutely horrible for this guy [Music] my he wins a playstation game as well as a special controller for it but he doesn't have a playstation or a tv to play it on he then also
wins raw pork and raw crab and eats it raw because he didn't really have an efficient way of cooking those and you can see that he talks a lot to the stuffed seal this is very much like a castaway situation with wilson he when you're deprived of human contact for as long as nasubi has been you start to try and find ways of being social humans are social creatures by nature which is why it's so torturous to be deprived of that it's [ __ ] brutal it's been right around three months by this point and
he is not even halfway done to the millionaire goal he's able to win a vacuum cleaner which enables him to clean the room for the first time in three months and then wins a tv which would have been great because he'd finally have some source of entertainment but unfortunately since there was no antenna it was useless because it would only play static and he still didn't have a playstation to like play the playstation game that he won so the tv was just a source of [ __ ] white noise i suppose and then he finally
gets something really really useful which is a toothbrush and toothpaste which lets him brush his teeth for the first time in three months [Music] this is one component that i always see left out for all of the publications or videos that talk about the horror of the nasubi story they actually had a doctor come in and check up on them the staff wanted to make sure that he wasn't like on the brink of death or that he hadn't contracted any like serious disease or anything so they had a doctor come in take his vitals also
did like a blood and urine test or so they claim and then gave him a clean bill of health now assuming that that's all legitimate and not just you know theatrics for the television program i would still say this doesn't take into account the actual torture this man is enduring like even if his vitals are okay he doesn't have a disease or any like big alarming health concerns this is a man that has been deprived of sunlight socialization entertainment and just basic human needs for three months by this point so even if all the blood
work and all that is within normal limits this is a man who is still very much not okay and to try and make it seem like no everything's great nasubi's happy and this is a totally fine by the books thing look the doctor even says so is even more scummy and shitty [Music] [Music] hey somehow the story keeps getting more tragic the rice that he won on the 20th day was finally running out and he was unable to win any more during this time so he resorted to eating dog food and dog food became the
primary thing that he was eating it was like his main diet so he was surviving off dog food and another thing that i've seen brought up a few times that i also question is the legitimacy of like what shows up because it would have been very easy for producers to intercept things that nasubi had won if they were too helpful like i find it very odd that the only thing the subi won in terms of clothing throughout all 15 months was a pair of panties that seemed so unrealistic i really think there may have been
foul play and this is just a conspiracy where the producers intercepted clothes in order to keep him naked for the sake of the comedy of the show and i think that there could have been a lot of cases like that there's also nothing that would have stopped them from sending things he didn't win like dog food he may have never like entered a dog food sweepstakes and they could have sent it to him in order to further humiliate and torture him for the for the audience there's just so much [ __ ] in here that
is beyond cruel and unusual it blows my mind that this is something that actually happened to a real human being luckily he was able to win rice three months later he won 10 kilograms of rice about three-ish months after mainly surviving off dog food as well as a couple of other foods that he'd win here and there but dog food for a while was like his primary source of nutrition and then he finally gets rice again now it's been about six months ish and he is finally halfway to the goal in six months he reaches
the halfway point according to atrocity guide he has submitted 38 000 entries by this point 38 000 sweepstakes entries in six months and he is only halfway to the goal [Music] um just when you thought it couldn't get more [ __ ] up so what happened here is this show was so popular people eventually found out where nasubi was being held so there was paparazzi reporters and everything that all were crowding around the space so the producers moved him to an identical space where no one would know where he was it was super far away
it was like five hours away i believe and this whole time nisubi thought oh i must have won but it turns out he didn't they were just moving him to continue the game in a different location it looks like actual kidnapping and to a certain extent it is the entire time nasubi is kind of delirious he hasn't talked to people in a long time he even says his mind is clouded with anxiety and he's saying things that don't make any sense he's unable to really talk to people or talk around people in general he's like
completely lost that ability due to right around six months in total isolation [Music] the team told nasubi that he was moved to a new location for renewed luck so better fortune at a new spot because they didn't want to tell him the real reason that they were relocating him so they came up with that and i'm pretty sure nasubi doesn't believe them because he kind of laughs about it saying oh so it's for my own benefit i think he's very well aware now that this is a pretty [ __ ] evil team of producers here
and whatever reason they had for moving him probably wasn't for his own benefits his first win in the new location actually is a [ __ ] fat one he gets a new desk a new chair they're both relatively expensive too so it's a great victory for him and he shows his nails the nail growth is outrageous he hasn't been able to trim them in about six months now like he is genuinely a prisoner here and it shows with this room switch producers decided to offer a live web stream alternative causing them to digitally follow nasubi
around with a joystick in order to censor his genitalia as you can see the quality of the live stream is primitive but keep in mind this is in the late 90s i couldn't actually find a high quality clip showing how they censored the live stream or did the live broadcast so this comes from atrocity guide as well what they did is the producers had a whole team that was dedicated to following the subi around with a joystick like they were playing a [ __ ] arcade game with a sensor to keep his dick and balls
off the screen and they live streamed him they wanted to offer a real-time alternative instead of just doing like the weekly misubi update with clips they wanted 24 7 nasubi coverage for anyone that wanted to go watch so this was pretty innovative for its time i think it's definitely one of the first like actual around-the-clock live streams that ever actually aired it's pretty impressive [Music] [Music] so nasubi initially had a good string of luck at the new location i believe according to atrocity guide he had done 17 000 entries and one decent stuff but then
hit a really bad cold streak even ran out of food at one point so the producers did move him again to another location to help him out in winning more prizes i suppose and it worked because he did win more prizes he finally wins food again and really celebrates getting some potato chips and he also gets a vhs player which will be nice to go with the tv assuming he ever wins a vhs tape to play it but i think the most important thing he wins here is toilet paper this is the first time he's
had toilet paper in his entire stay 10 months so far and to celebrate he tries to take his [ __ ] just out of frame but was unable to so an unsuccessful mission there but at least he finally has toilet paper [Music] now this is by far the meatiest win he's gotten so far a playstation that's pretty expensive especially during this time period and it also enables him to have real entertainment for the first time in 10 months this this is like a moment that's straight out of like civilization where you climb up the tech
tree slowly but surely eight months prior to this he won a playstation one game din should go which also had the special controller to go with it couldn't play it obviously at the time six months ago he won a tv so he had a playstation game a controller a tv but no console he finally got that last missing piece of the puzzle the console and is able to play playstation games now well the single playstation game he's won and what's really interesting about this is this is his first piece of actual entertainment he's had since
being [ __ ] imprisoned here but also and this was pointed out by caleb this would make him the world's first video game live streamer because this is all being live streamed all this is a live broadcast and he spent four straight days playing his playstation so for four straight days he was being streamed playing a game this man was the patient zero of streaming he walked so twitch could run from that [Music] day [Music] he played so much that he had to ban himself from playing it further so he could focus on entering into
more sweepstakes and getting closer to freedom so he stopped playing the game went back to writing entries and he was able to do it he pulled off the last remaining prizes he needed to reach that million mark [Music] the tires put him extremely close to completing the challenge he was right at the finish line here so close he could throw the dinsha the goat disc right over the finish line only a couple more wins would secure this and he was able to pull it off the final item he won that put him over the million
yen threshold was a bag of rice but nasubi didn't know he won it had been 335 straight days of constant non-stop relentless filling out of sweepstakes in order to win these prizes 335 days of torture and nisubi had finally reached the finish line but didn't know it oh [Music] is [Music] per usual the producers come in like a group of burglars during the night and start popping party poppers in his face which scares the [ __ ] out of him and really confuses him they eventually explain that he did win he made a million yen
and they give him his clothes back it's been 11 months and one day and is the first time nasubi's putting clothes on in that entire time frame so when he puts him on he says that it's uncomfortable and itchy uh but he's very very very happy to be done with the contest and glad that he's completed it but that's not where this story ends the producers took nasubi to korea telling him it was a celebration for completing the game and for all of his hard work so they went to an amusement park he ate a
lot of great food he had a wonderful incredible time and then things got real [ __ ] up [Music] was making them far too much money the producers weren't done suckling from this cash cow's teat so they trapped nasubi in korea the goal this time wasn't a million yen this time he was going to have to enter sweepstakes in korea which he didn't speak korean so he had to use a korean to japanese dictionary to translate his goal was to enter the sweepstakes win prizes enough to afford a plane ticket from korea to japan that
was the objective he was stripped naked yet again and forced to endure the same torture that he had already endured for 335 days prior i would like to make a mention here there is a moment where the producer says if you don't want to do this just say so to which nasubi responds i'll do it so i don't think they had ever forced him against his will to complete these challenges but he was pretty much promised fame after doing these things so in the pursuit of nasubi's big dreams he allowed himself to be tortured mercilessly
for 15 months [Music] ultra straight up turbo mode he had become a master at this [ __ ] so he was actually able to complete this challenge in just about two months which made the producers very upset because he didn't suffer long enough so they increased the challenge duration they moved the goal post instead of just getting a one-way ticket from korea to japan in economy class they required him to get an additional 9 000 yen in prize winnings to upgrade that ticket to business class [Music] business [Music] yeah more scummy evil [ __ ]
from the producers here they never even told him he initially completed the goal here they just let him keep writing postcards until he'd gather another 9 000 yen they didn't want him to win quickly they didn't really want him to win at all because the longer he struggles and suffers the more money they were making so they let him just keep going and trying to spin it as a positive thing like look at how hard nasubi's working we're not going to let him fly an economy class so the new goal is business class because it's
what nasubi would want just genuinely [ __ ] [ __ ] [Music] 9500 yen after winning some expensive tea leaves so he was absolutely slapping the producers bottoms like he was going hog wild right now so again they increased the goal without ever telling him now business class wasn't good enough now is going to have to be a first class ticket which was an additional 20 000 yen i believe which again was pretty quick for nasubi to gather he won a live octopus a big picture frame and was able to gather enough money through prizes
pretty quickly to get that final rank up to first class passenger so then he finally gets the ticket from korea to japan and first class and it's over so stay productive foreign sid now [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Music] but the story wouldn't be complete without one more final act of cruelty towards nasubi they blindfold him put noise-cancelling headphones on him disorient him and drag him on stage into a mock room designed to look like the rooms that he'd been staying in for the last 15 months so on a pure instinct he gets completely nude again
it's the only life he knows so without ever being told to take his clothes off he does it anyway and then the walls break away revealing a live studio audience laughing at him and congratulating him for completing the show nasubi is understandably confused because for 15 months he has been psychologically and physically tortured so he doesn't understand what's happening he doesn't get it and is shocked scared and all around bewildered it's just one more sick [ __ ] joke from the producers millions of people watching the finale as well as thousands in person watching him
completely naked and completely having no idea what's going on or why the life of prizes was finally complete and the entire show sunu din pashonen was cancelled pretty shortly after it didn't have like a super long run after this but the toll that this experience took on nasubi's life obviously didn't stop with the finale he reported being uncomfortable in clothes for about six months afterwards and his social skills had obviously deteriorated he said he was a lot more shy and not really able to be a comedian super well anymore because obviously he had been cut
off for so long from people he just kind of lost the ability to carry on conversations efficiently and overall just became a lot more reserved as a result of this he did however sell his diary the nasubi life of prizes diary in like his journal and i was a bestseller that was a massive success but he himself never achieved that level of fame that he was kind of promised with a show like this he did have certain roles in other productions and some of them pretty sizable roles in other productions but never a massive success
in japan even though this is like the most successful live stream in japan's history so just an overall extremely sad and cruel story the main producer behind this show has gone on record and said he doesn't regret anything he said his goal is to make miracles on film and with nasubi he accomplished that goal he did apologize to nasubi and nasubi confirms that the producer did apologize to him but the apology only does [ __ ] all like that doesn't make up for 15 months of lost human contact and health you know like that's that's
that's a nothing burger but i guess at least he apologized even though he made millions of dollars off the back of nasubi's suffering but anyway i wanted to share this story because i find it to be one of the most interesting ones when it comes to like live broadcast television as well as live streaming this is one of the first live streams and it was [ __ ] bizarre extremely [ __ ] up story uh and yeah i just wanted to share that with all of you thank you to caleb and chelsea for compiling a
bunch of clips here so that way we could tell the story as best as possible and uh yeah that's about it see ya
