Prize Prison

Hey true weirdos, at the end of this episode, stick around if you want for a little bonus content and conversation. More than 600 different reality TV shows are floating around out there, and they've been around longer than you think. Candid Camera was the first reality show. Bet you could name 10 or 20 more right off the top of your head.

From singing and cooking competitions to gladiator challenges and survival stunts, reality TV is a cheap way for producers to rake in big bucks. It's all in fun, right? All entertainment. Everyone gets paid and no one gets hurt. Not really. Well, that's not always true. There was a reality TV show that put a contestant through the kind of treatment that's considered too extreme and too illegal for even the worst criminal in the harshest American prison.

But hey, why should a game show contestant be treated any better than a serial killer? Grab the popcorn and let's watch. Weird stuff. It's called a Supermax or ADX prison. That's where you go if you're the kind of inmate who's considered a high security risk or you're someone who represents an extreme threat to national security.

There's only one federal maximum security prison in the United States, the United States Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility in Florence, Colorado. The inmates housed there are a real who's who of the worst of the worst. Like Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber, though in 2021, he was moved to a prison medical facility in North Carolina.

And Richard Reed, the terrorist who tried and failed to bomb an American Airlines flight in 2001, his shoe bomb, thankfully bombed. Remember that drug cartel mastermind Joaquin Guzman, aka El Chapo, is there along with Atlanta bomber Eric Rudolph. And if you're looking for the founder of the Aryan Brotherhood, Tyler Bingham, he's kicking it big racist style in there for the rest of his life.

These are inmates classified as too dangerous for even the most hardcore maximum security prison. At last count, 330 men are incarcerated there, divided into six levels of security. Now the thing that sets the ADX in Colorado apart from every other corrections facility in the country is how the inmates are housed. They mark their days in seven by 12 foot single cells made of reinforced concrete.

Each cell has a window through which only the sky can be seen. That's designed to prevent the inmates from knowing exactly where in the prison complex their cell is located. The doors are made of solid steel with a small slot. That's where meals arrive. Each cell has a sink, toilet and shower, all specially designed for max safety and minimal opportunities for self-harm.

Water is controlled by a timer. No chance of an inmate flooding his cell. Inmates are monitored 24-7 and kept in solitary confinement for up to 23 hours per day. Their only exercise takes place in a concrete pit. It takes about 32 steps to walk the whole circumference. Picture an in-ground swimming pool without the water.

Like hell, the ADX has levels. There are two intermediate units for what they call step-down inmates. These are prisoners who might get transferred to another corrections institution if they behave. Step-down inmates have a little bit more freedom of movement and they can interact with other inmates at that level. At the other extreme is Range 13, a four-cell unit designed for the most dangerous prisoners.

It's super secure and super isolated. El Chapo and Ramzi Youssef, one of the masterminds behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, they're housed in Range 13. These are inmates who will never again experience freedom, never again have a moment's privacy. Solitary confinement has been a go-to in American prisons since 1829.

Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia was the first to utilize it. A group called the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prison believed that solitude encouraged both regret and reform. They were convinced that time spent in solitary contemplation of one's actions would surely lead to sincere penance.

Penance, that's where we get the word penitentiary, by the way. This idea of deep reflection leading to rehabilitation was strongly promoted by the Society's mostly Quaker membership. You'd expect the prisons of the olden days to be much harsher and more punitive than our modern prisons, right? But the inmates at Eastern State had much bigger cells than those at the Florence Supermax do today.

Plus, each cell at Eastern State had its own little exercise yard attached to it. Prisoners were allowed the occasional visitor, and in time, work was added to the mix. Alone in their cells, the inmates made shoes and weaved cloth, that sort of thing. One long before other prisons copied the so-called Philadelphia system and the practice of keeping inmates in solitary confinement spread to Europe.

The philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville and the famed prison reformer Gustave de Beaumont just about tripped over themselves praising the Philadelphia system back in 1833. If it is true that in establishments of this nature all evil originates from intercourse of the prisoners among themselves, we are obliged to acknowledge that nowhere is this vice avoided with greater safety than in Philadelphia, where the prisoners find themselves utterly unable to communicate with each other.

And it is uncontestable that this perfect isolation secures the prisoner from all fatal contamination. But even back then, in the 17th century, this method of perfect isolation had its critics. Critics who were concerned about what all that forced isolation was doing to the minds and sanity of those prisoners. And they weren't wrong, because what we know now is just how damaging solitary confinement really is.

Humans are social animals. We don't thrive in isolation. We need each other. Our reliance on other humans, our ability to create these complex social bonds, these are the very things that helped us evolve, creating clans and communities and society itself. Even our neurobiology is wired to be social. People have something called mirror neurons.

That's how we're able to almost instantly match each other's emotions. And we do it without even thinking about it. It happens on the subconscious level. We're super good at anticipating each other's behaviors. And our brains have a way of syncing up when we do something like what we're doing right now, telling a story and listening to a story.

How cool is that? You know, when we're not oppressing and killing each other, humans are pretty awesome little creatures and we're at our best when we find ways to communicate and cooperate and coexist. That's how we thrive. When it comes to solitary confinement, turns out it doesn't take much of it before a person begins deteriorating, really deteriorating.

In 1993, psychologist Dr. Stuart Grashen, after working with inmates at California's Pelican Bay Penitentiary, found that solitary confinement induces a psychiatric disorder characterized by hallucinations, panic attacks, cognitive deficits, obsessive thinking, paranoia, high rates of anxiety, nervousness, obsessive ruminations, anger, violent fantasies, nightmares, trouble sleeping, as well as dizziness, perspiring hands and heart palpitations.

Jump to 2011 and another psychologist, Dr. Craig Haney, testified that prisoners in solitary confinement complain of chronic and overwhelming sadness, hopelessness, and depression. Many become deeply and unshakably paranoid and are profoundly anxious around and afraid of people on those rare occasions when they're allowed contact with them.

Some begin to lose their grasp on sanity and badly decompensate. 2013 brought this finding from forensic psychiatrist Dr. Raymond Patterson. Inmates in solitary confinement were much more likely to commit suicide than inmates held in the general population, as in, as much as 33 times more likely to take their own lives.

This type of punishment, long known to be brutal and devastating, is something we reserve for the most dangerous people incarcerated in our corrections institutions. People who are so terrible that they've been banished from human society. We lock them up, alone with only their own tortured thoughts, knowing that the odds are they'll lose their minds and maybe take their own lives.

It's not a game. Knowing this, you have to ask, what in the world were the producers of the Japanese reality TV show, Susunu Denpa Shounen, thinking? In English, Susunu Denpa Shounen means, don't go for it, electric boy. It ran from January 1998 to September 2002 on Japan's Nippon TV network, and I think it's fair to call it one of the most deranged, diabolical, and dystopian things ever aired on television.

The premise was a pretty basic and now familiar reality TV plotline, put the show's participants in extreme situations and watch how they react. That's the basic gist of everything from Survivor to The Amazing Race to Big Brother. I mean, isn't every Real Housewives series built on this same model? Susunu Denpa Shounen was different.

It was extreme in a way that even alone or naked and afraid can't match. It's not a stretch to describe the show as torture for your viewing pleasure. It was primetime sadism, like what might happen if the Saw movie and the Truman Show had a Contestants on the show tended to be struggling, unknown comedians desperate for their big break.

The entire application process was deliberately shrouded in mystery. Those who were selected were told nothing. They were just thrown immediately into whatever the challenge the producers had cooked up. Maybe that doesn't sound so bad, right? I mean, how bad could it be? It's on TV. It's all in fun. All men is entertainment.

The show's producers had to follow some sort of rules, right? Yeah, not so much. As comedian Tomoaki Hamatsu learned the hardest of hard ways. So the story goes like this. In January 1998, Hamatsu joined a group of struggling unknown comedians in Japan at an audition for a new TV show. The comedians had declared that they were willing to do anything to be famous.

They were entered into a random drawing. Hamatsu was selected. He was told that the project would begin immediately. And unless he agreed, the invitation will be revoked and given to another comic. Hamatsu agreed and was promptly blindfolded and taken to a small, sparsely furnished room and ordered to strip naked. Producers informed him then that he must meet his own needs for survival, you know, food and clothing by entering sweepstakes.

And that he would remain in that room alone until he managed to win one million yen total in prizes. And that equated to about $8,300 at that time. Then they left, locking the door behind them. The room was equipped with only heat, electricity, running water, stacks of magazines and the postcards necessary for entering the sweepstakes.

The show's producers had leased an apartment next door. They were under strict orders not to communicate in any way with Hamatsu, who was also aware that he'd just been given a new name. Tomoaki Hamatsu had a long face. Kind of like an eggplant, the producers thought. So they christened their contestant Nasubi, which means eggplant.

And then for added hilarity, they used an animated cartoon eggplant to conceal his genitals whenever the naked man was on camera. There were no grooming products or tools in the room, not even a shaving razor. There was also no food. In the beginning, show staffers slipped Nasubi a few crackers every day out of concern he might starve to death.

But before too long, Nasubi clocked his first sweepstakes win, a 12-pack of juice boxes. The crackers disappeared and Nasubi was officially on his own. Nasubi had no idea that his life in that tiny room was being viewed on TV by millions of people. I was never told that this would be a broadcast. I thought it was going to be a pilot, an experiment to see if the show could be on air or not.

I thought it would probably last a maximum of maybe one or two months. It was the producers' insistence on his nudity that convinced Hamatsu that the show was being taped for later broadcast. Now, Nasubi was aware that there was a camera in the room. The producers themselves had pointed it out, assuring Nasubi that any footage collected was unlikely to ever be shown.

They were lying. Nasubi was blissfully unaware that he was the star of a brand new feature on Susunu Denpa Shounen. It was called A Life in Prizes. It was an instant hit, quickly becoming the most popular part of the program. How could it not? It was the ultimate in chaotic voyeurism. Flip the channel and watch a naked man frantically entering contests and magazines to try to win a pair of pants and something to eat.

Viewers assumed Nasubi was in on it. The way we assume the contestants on a show like The Bachelor know that they aren't the only ones climbing out of the hot tub after making ridiculously premature promises of eternal love to whatever spray tan slab of gym meat has been designated this season's ultimate catch. Every episode featured Nasubi simply going about his daily routines and filling out piles of sweepstake forms.

Any time he actually won a prize, he broke into a celebratory little dance which drove audiences wild. He'd scamper around the room grinning in delight, the cartoon eggplant covering his groin just bouncing along. Viewers became obsessed with him, so much so that the producers soon gave him a journal. Then they published it without his knowledge.

Nasubi's diary quickly became a bestseller in Japan. Wait, how can they do that? How's that even legal? Oh, it's such a good question. Here's how they did it. The reality TV show contract. Every show's different, of course, but something they all share are contracts that read like the sort of thing you'd expect to sign after selling your soul to the devil.

Contestants on these shows become the property of the show, like forever. Let's take a look at the contract they hand to contestants on CBS's Survivor. For starters, you'll be signing a tight nondisclosure agreement, the NDA. Break that and you'll face fines that could be in the millions. If you're eliminated from competition, you must consent to remain at what they call the series location annex until the production season is finished.

And that production typically takes 45 days, but it's always at the discretion of the producer. So he could be stuck there for even longer. It's spelled out that this location annex will be primitive, no frills, and that you will be expected to participate in numerous practical activities and do chores during your time there.

You must consent that all material used in the show is at the producer's discretion. You have to sign off on any depiction of yourself, factual or fictional, that might be private, intimate, embarrassing, disparaging, defamatory, unfavorable, basically anything that could lead to public ridicule, humiliation or condemnation.

This is fun. You must consent to whatever psychological and or physical tests the producers feel like administering, including lie detector tests, both before and during the series production. And get this, the producers have the right to do whatever they please with this information. Broadcast it, advertise it, publish it, whatever.

If you're thinking, well, OK, but just during the series, right? Ha ha ha. No, the producer has the sole discretion over when and where and how that info is used. As in, you know, forever. You, on the other hand, best STFU. You're not allowed to discuss your experience on the show, not with anyone for any reason unless CBS tells you to.

This is legally binding until three years after the whole series is ended, not just your season. Considering that Survivor's been around since May 31st, 2000 and shows no signs of fading away, you'll need to stay quiet for a long, long, long time. And you better get the family on board because they'll be signing releases, too.

And that includes roommates if you have them. Getting this done, you agree, will be on your own time and your own dime. My favorite part is this one. I irrevocably grant and release to CBS in perpetuity and throughout the universe the exclusive right, if I am selected as a contestant in the series, to depict, portray and represent me in my life and all episodes, exploits, events, incidents, situations and experiences in connection with the series.

OK, so even if a flying saucer full of aliens snatched you off to their distant world, some lawyer for CBS could still show up and sue you. Also, your life as described above is the networks for the taking. Movies, books, cartoons, drama, comedy, merchandise. They own it forever and ever and everywhere in the whole universe.

Like we said, every reality show is different. And you know that for some people, there are always exceptions, ways to negotiate more favorable terms and a deal. But one way reality shows are all the same is this. The producers hold the power. You balk at signing the contract. No problem. There are literally thousands of people waiting behind you who are happy to do it.

That was as true in Japan as it is here in the US. But the first wave of Japanese reality TV shows were crazy, sadistic. Contestants on those shows were frequently injured and sometimes seriously. That can happen when you slurp down a bowl of boiling hot ramen or launch your body at a wall like a cannonball. Nasubi was just 22 years old when he stepped into that small room.

He stood nearly six feet tall and weighed just under 160 pounds. Before it was all over, Nasubi would weigh in at an emaciated 88 pounds. A transformation that was watched every Sunday night by more than 15 million people for nearly a year and a half. Nasubi had gotten right to work entering those sweepstakes with nothing else to fill his time and no hope of eating or drinking or escaping the room.

He entered roughly a thousand contests a week. In the beginning, the people working on the television show really kind of created all the loneliness for me. I really felt cornered and then I felt that's really scary how humans can do that to other people. It's the law of averages. Enter thousands of contests and sooner or later you're bound to win something.

The only clothing Nasubi managed to win in all that time was a pair of women's panties, which didn't fit. Lots of the prizes he managed to score were useless to him. Things like a bicycle, movie theater tickets and a tent. He did win a large bag of rice, but with no pot to cook it. Tried and somehow sustained himself by eating it raw, which made his win of a large supply of dog food a lucky break.

That dog food is what kept him alive. He even looked happy as he munched down handfuls of Purina One. The day he won a crate of bananas was almost too joyful to watch. It was 10 months into his ordeal before he hit the jackpot and won a package of toilet paper. I know you're wondering, so I'll tell you that up till then, he'd just been washing his hands very, very, very thoroughly.

He won a small stuffed animal and began chatting with it. If you're thinking of Tom Hanks and Wilson, the volleyball in the movie Castaway, you're right. It was just like that. And viewers ate it up. Nasubi's segment on the show each week was about 10 minutes long. What the people watching at home didn't know was that those 10 minutes were compiled from a solid week's worth of filming.

They saw the highlights, Nasubi's happy dance at winning a prize, his animated conversations with the stuffed toy and, of course, his gobbling dog food. What they didn't see were the hours of crushing isolation, his desperation and his decline. Although I seemed like I was having fun for most of the time on the edited show, to me, it was full of pain.

Everything was harsh and every day was like hell back then. The hardest thing was to not be able to see and talk with anyone. My mental condition was at its worst. I was like, why only me? Why do I have to do all these things? I'd rather die than feel like this. And then there was the live stream. Nasubi was far too popular for just Sunday night.

Using the newest Internet technology, and remember, this is 1998 and the Internet is still a baby, producers created a 24-7 live stream. People could log in at any time and watch Nasubi, complete with the trademark eggplant covering his genitals. It's too awful to imagine, isn't it? Going about your daily life with no clue that thousands and thousands of strangers are watching your every move.

But again, the audience assumed that Nasubi was in on it. It took 15 months, but the day came when Nasubi hit his goal of winning a million yen worth of prizes. What happened next is too insane to be real, except it is real and it's really insane. Ready? The producers burst into his room while he was sleeping, shooting off party poppers and hollering, you won, you won, you did it.

They returned his clothing and urged him to get dressed. It was time to celebrate, they said. A whole day filled with fun in Seoul, South Korea. It sounds great, right? Except they were lying. Here's what actually happened. They took him to Seoul, South Korea, and the producer set Nasubi up in a sparsely furnished room, identical to the one back in Japan.

And they informed him that it was time to do it all again. Nasubi broke, he pleaded with the executive producer, a man named Toshio Tsuchiya, who admitted that by this point he was just basically obsessed with seeing how far Nasubi could be pushed. It took three hours of pleading and negotiating before Nasubi broke down and agreed.

The new challenge? Win enough sweepstakes to pay for his flight home to Japan economy class. When Nasubi hit that goal super fast, because by this point he was an expert at the whole sweepstakes game, the producer said, nah, we really meant to say you had to earn a business class ticket. And Nasubi did. And then they changed that to a first class ticket, which in time Nasubi managed to earn.

The producers then led Nasubi to yet another sparsely furnished apartment back home in Japan, where without even being asked, he removed all of his clothing. As he sat there, his hair long and unkempt, weighing just 88 pounds with sunken eyes and long, dirty fingernails, the walls of the room suddenly fell away. Nasubi's apartment wasn't an apartment at all.

He was on a studio soundstage, bathed in glaring theatrical lights and surrounded on all sides by a wildly cheering live audience. Thank you! Nasubi, congratulations! It was April 1999. 15 months had passed since that day in January 1998. Tomoaki Hamatsu's name was drawn at random. He was Nasubi now. And that was the moment he discovered. Why is everybody laughing?

He was shaking, visibly confused and disoriented. The show's host shouted that he was a star, a big star. Do you mean that everyone has been watching my naked body all this time? That's out of order. Is it allowed? It's tempting to think that the creators of Susumu Denposhonin just ripped off the movie The Truman Show.

But no, The Truman Show premiered in the U.S. in June 1998, months after Nasubi's game show ordeal began. Like Nasubi, Truman had no idea that every moment of his life was being broadcast as a reality TV show. No idea that his home was actually a soundstage. The Truman was fed and clothed and entirely fictional. Why did Nasubi stay? Why didn't he demand to be released? Why didn't he tell the producers that enough was enough and no TV show was worth this kind of suffering?

As it turns out, that door to Nasubi's apartment was unlocked and never locked again. He could have left at any time. So why didn't he? If you have Hulu, there is a fantastic documentary by British filmmaker Claire Titley called The Contestant. It's about Nasubi, and in it, he tries to explain what he was thinking and feeling at the time.

Titley had all the same questions we do. How in the world was this permitted? Why didn't Nasubi revolt? You hear of people being held captive. Psychologically, you feel that rather than escaping or doing something radical, staying put, not causing trouble is the safest option. It's a strange psychological state. You lose the will to escape.

There was a lot of speculation about just why Nasubi submitted to this torture, why he accepted his fate with so little resistance. Some people said it was all down to the Japanese culture of conformity, the idea that the nail that sticks up is the one that gets hammered down. They pointed to Ami, a Japanese cultural concept that basically describes the dependence and indebtedness that people feel toward each other.

Ami makes it difficult or uncomfortable to refuse a request. Japanese society is highly group oriented, the opposite of the American culture of the individual. The Japanese value the strength of the group, not the individual. Was Nasubi just trying to go along with the producers, maintain some kind of unity? Did he fear being punished or maybe even ostracized for failing to go along?

There were many who were like, oh, see what group think gets you? That would never happen here. But you know, it's just a little more complicated than that, isn't it? What Nasubi endured would be judged a violation of human rights, even in the harshest of prisons. We even have an amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the Eighth Amendment, that forbids cruel and unusual punishment.

You think leaving a man naked with only dog food to eat and broadcasting that to an audience of millions might qualify as cruel and unusual? Of course it would. El Chapo has a better life in the Supermax prison than Nasubi did on that reality TV show. The executive producer Toshio Tsuchiya once said that while TV has celebrities and stars, they aren't strictly necessary to make a great show.

He said you could drop almost anyone into a situation and give them a challenge or a task because all humans are entertaining to watch. It was Tajio who forbade the crew to speak to Nasubi, who stopped them from feeding him even crackers. Shockingly, Tsuchiya didn't make Nasubi sign a contract, something that would never, ever, ever, ever happen on an American reality show, because we are a nation of people who can't wait to sue somebody for something.

At the time the show aired, Toshio Tsuchiya was like, sorry, not sorry, zero repentance. Tajio wanted to be the biggest and the best in Japanese television. He wanted to set records for viewership and ratings. Nasubi was a means to an end. Tajio scarcely recognized him as human. With time, though, that kind of changed.

Eventually, Tajio acknowledged how his own ambition had driven him maybe too far. He's almost 68 years old now, still working in television. And unbelievably, he's been forgiven by the man he once tortured for ratings. Tajio says today that he would even do anything Nasubi asked, even if it put his own life on the line.

Which is great and all, but there's no escaping the fact that 15 months in solitary confinement, deprived of nutrition and human companionship, took a terrible toll on Nasubi. And the fact that it was televised only made it worse. For the first six months or so after Susumu ended, Nasubi struggled with simple acts of daily living.

Wearing clothing was nearly unbearable. It was too hot, too confining. Making even basic conversation was difficult and remained that way for a long, long time. That's a classic response seen in prisoners held for extended periods in solitary confinement. Tight insult to injury, as the saying goes. Nasubi's showbiz career wasn't much help by his fame on Susunu Denpa Shounen.

He returned to his hometown, Fukushima, where he was now a household name. He acted on the stage and appeared here and there on various game shows. And he set a goal for himself. Climb Mount Everest. The Everest climb was all part of his effort to call attention to the recovery of Fukushima, which had been devastated in 2011 by an earthquake and tsunami.

Nasubi finally succeeded on his fourth Everest attempt in 2016. An expedition that was funded in part by his old nemesis, Toshio Tsuchiya. It was the destruction of Fukushima that changed everything for Nasubi. It was the first time he saw how his bizarre fame might have some value. When he joined the rescue efforts, cameras followed.

It was empowering, he said. It was a way of turning what had been traumatic into something positive. Something that might be of use to help people. It changed his life every bit as much as Denpa Shounen had. Only this time, for the better. Then came 2020 and the global COVID-19 pandemic. Suddenly, Nasubi was in demand as an expert in dealing with feelings of isolation.

He became a powerful advocate in Japan for social distancing. Because if there was one thing Nasubi understood, it was how to be alone. Nasubi told the LA Times that people often asked him why he didn't sue the show. He said that it was only in speaking to the Western press that he even learned the word sue. That he had no idea what it meant to sue someone.

He tried to explain that the world was different in 1998. That Toshio Tsuchiya was the biggest of big deals. You were all but guaranteed fame if you were part of his show. That's just how it was. No one dreamed of filing a lawsuit then. And now? Instead of hurting other people by suing them, just to gain money for myself.

I decided just to accept my past. I was more into acceptance of my life. I feel like I can use that hatred and anger, that negative energy. And make it into positive energy within myself. I can relate to people in struggling situations. To vulnerable people. And as for his return to television, in the documentary, The Contestant.

Nasubi finally gets to tell his story. He's no longer a starving, naked spectacle, scooping dog food out of the can with his fingers. No longer the butt of a joke. He had no idea what was being told. The documentary gave him a way to turn that whole wretched, deranged ordeal into something meaningful. If I can use my past, my struggles in life, to help other people feel like it's okay to go on.

Then I feel like my past wasn't wasted. It was something useful. Damn, what a human. What a life, right? If destiny is real, this is some kind of wild fate to be handed. That such a beautiful soul could climb out of the wreckage of such an ugly story. Wow, it's humbling. Nasubi's time in solitary confinement, all the deprivation and ridicule, hurt him.

But it didn't break him. Which may be the most amazing part of his story. Not everyone involved in Nasubi's tale came out of it wise and forgiving and enlightened. I mean, the TV business is where those three things go to be butchered and sold. Even now, despite his warm relationship with Nasubi, producer Toshio Tsuchiya remains just the teeniest, tiniest bit defensive.

When asked today if he thinks what Nasubi suffered can be justified in any way as entertainment, he shrugs. Look, he says, it is what it is. But listen, we would never do to people what they do on Love Island. Touché, Tajio. Touché. Next time on True Weird Stuff. People are complicated. You know, people can be heroic and people can be terrible.

And some people are heroic and terrible at the same time. Like they start off trying to help children and end up shocking them and giving them LSD. What are you going to do? Shock Doc on the next True Weird Stuff. Special thanks to our voice talents on this episode. Kary "Doc" Bowser, Don Morgan, and myself with an incredibly bad French accent.

So Max, quick question. Yeah. You and I talked about Nasubi's ordeal back when this show aired. It was 1999 when it came out. And I double checked. I did like a search of what kind of coverage did Susunu Denpa Shounen get in the United States. And people treat it, what happened to this man, like a giant freaking joke. But I remember the two of us looking at each other and going, oh, yeah, I do remember that.

I mean, it's unconscionable that they're going to do this to somebody for entertainment, even though he agreed to do whatever they asked him to do. Is there anybody that went, oh, I'm feeling real uncomfortable with this. But I guess if they thought he was in on it. But the audience thought he was in on it the same way when we watch.

What's that show where people. There was a show from Japan that came out at the same time as Susunu Denpa Shounen called Most Extreme Elimination Challenge. Do you remember that? Yeah, I do. And then then they did a take on it with a different name in the States where people basically get. They they're jumping, trying to jump across things, they're smack in the face and knocked into the water.

When you watch that, which, by the way, is like, I can't resist it. But when you watch that, you are acting under the assumption these contestants knew what was coming. They agreed to it for whatever reason. They're getting paid something. Right. Right. The people watching the Subi thought he's he's a comedian. He wants to be famous.

He's in on it. Not realizing that they were watching a human being lose half his body weight and nearly starve to death. Who had no idea that he was being televised. And as if the TV show wasn't wretched enough when they flip to the 24 seven live stream. I think they're like things in the Geneva Convention and the Nuremberg Code against this.

Like, this is crazy to me. If you, you know, and you talked about this at the beginning, let's just say it was the isolation and that was it. And it wasn't all of this other stuff, the starvation and everything else. I mean, that psychologically is bad enough for you. But the things that they did to him. I'm sorry. I guess the guy that was the producer says, oops, I guess I wanted too much.

And sorry. I understand why he doesn't hold any ill will against him because he realized that that weights him down, you know. But at the same time, I don't know. There is something that is so inhumane about this for the purpose of entertainment. It's almost like you're watching a science fiction movie about something that could happen in the future.

You know, that's what shocked me when this story broke in the U.S. in 1999. Like, wait, what? That that's a thing. Are they are you allowed to do that? You're not allowed to do it here. You know, maybe maybe you're allowed to do it there. Here's the deal. Prisoners that now outside of the supermax containment zone inmates in this country that are treated that way.

You can sue. I mean, my God, you can take it all the way to the Supreme Court. Well, maybe not. Maybe not this Supreme Court. But in theory, you can take it all the way to the Supreme Court because we know how devastating solitary confinement is. And the truth of it is people that are detained for less time than the Suebi was suffer lifelong issues.

One of them. One of the challenges that people who've been in solitary confinement have is with wayfinding. So you're held in this very small room with inadequate stimulation and social contact and for way less than 15 months. Something changes in your brain. And when you get out, your sense of where you are and where you're going.

Distances wayfinding is sort of permanently disrupted. The the inability to make and maintain conversation that can be permanent for people that have been held in solitary. And I think that the producer of this TV show and let me apologize for the incredible butchering of all these Japanese names. Toshio Tsuchiya. What a sadistic bastard.

I mean, if we can, by the way, with this, can I just say, oh, she got that. Oh, she got that one. Go ahead. I'm sorry. Tomoaki Hamatsu. I felt I felt like, yes, I think I've got your name. But Tajio, that's he's he's a consciousness sadistic bastard. Yeah. No matter what he says now, no matter what he says. Oh, I guess I ran away with it trying to get big ratings.

Oops. Sorry. Even what he said about Love Island. Like, I agree that Love Island is perhaps the egregious bottom that humanity can sink to. But he was like using that. Hey, I what I did was bad, but it's not that bad. Yeah. Well, on Love Island, they're allowed outside. They they're not forced to walk around naked and they're given food.

Like, think about think about just this for a second. Misubi was down to eighty eight pounds. And Max, what what would the fuckery of taking him to Korea and then doing putting him in the same room again, taking him back to Japan, putting him in the same room again? Can I just say that it's six foot one hundred sixty pounds.

He was there was no extra weight to begin with. But the whole thing about doing that, what you're talking about, taking him to Korea and all of that stuff, it was it was beyond the beyond. And the idea that they're saying, well, he could have walked out at any time. Well, he's been so beaten down psychologically. That's the thing.

He has lost the will. But you find that even that Stockholm syndrome and people are not isolated for any. You know, they're not isolated that long. You know, they're they're they're still having some interaction with other people. But you can see how that sort of thing can indeed happen. He was so broken down by the end of that 15 months.

He was a shell of a person. And the the most it's hard to pick like your favorite most cruel moment in this man's story. But I think that having the walls fall away and he's sitting there naked, surrounded by cheering strangers with light so bright that his eyes can't even open. That was the part. That was the part that seemed like science, real science fiction to me.

That that is something that you would see in some movie. I this is the kind of story that when you're telling it to somebody, they stop you and go, that can't be right. You are you sure? Did you maybe you misread that? They didn't really take him to South Korea and repeat the experiment. Well, they didn't really bring him back to Japan and do.

Yeah. Yeah, they really did. They really did. And this man who, by all rights, has no reason to not be rocking back and forth in an asylum instead has turned his suffering into work for the betterment of his community. If that doesn't sit you down, it's kind of astonishing to think about. I mean, who among us will be able to have that kind of fortitude to come up with some way of handling the situation that way?

But apparently it's healed him in some kind of way inside. So good for him that he's found a way to have good mental health out of all this. But can you imagine if he had been more fragile going in? What could have happened? They could. I mean, you know, they could have killed him. Yeah, they could have killed him. That's the reason why we told you in the beginning so that you would have a context for how terrible what happened to Nasubi was.

That we don't allow people to be treated that way unless they're in the most extreme high security prison in the United States. It's beyond the pale what happened to this man. And remember, he was only 22 when he did this. And people love to like Monday morning quarterback, I would have done this and I would have done that.

Well, you're not a 22-year-old Japanese dude, okay, in 1998. So you have to remember, you got to travel back in time a little bit. His family was very conservative. And when he told them he wanted to be a comedian, you know, his parents were a little disappointed that he wanted to be a comedian because it was, you know, they had higher hopes.

And his father, they finally, you know, they saw that there was no talking him out of it. He was so passionate. And his father finally said, well, whatever you do, don't do it naked. And then what happens? Their son becomes the naked pop culture star of the biggest TV show in Japan. And has no idea that any of it's happening.

There are so many, every time you peel a layer off of this story, there's an uglier one waiting for you underneath. And I thought it was interesting that Nasubi, see, we don't understand or we forget that every culture is different. And for Nasubi, there was no such thing as a lawsuit. He didn't even know the word. Like you just, people, this happened to you and, you know, you got to live with it somehow.

Max, it's insane, isn't it? I wonder if there is a consensus among people who watch the show who later found out what was actually going on, whether they felt any guilt over being so engrossed with this. That's, I mean, I really would wonder because if the situation. So if they were doing that in this country, and of course, we thought he was in on it.

We would have talked about this on the radio show. I mean, we would have been talking about it all the time because it's what everybody would have been talking about. Exactly. But I can promise you, I mean, I pulled up. I looked everywhere and found all of these stories in the American press and they were all really short.

And every story acknowledged, oh, he he only won a pair of panties and he ate dog food. But the idea that this man had been tortured, that wasn't part of it. And I don't know whether that was because probably American reporters working for People magazine just couldn't believe that was true. Because where we come from, you're not allowed to do that to people.

But I went looking, you know, reality TV show contracts are not easy to find. They don't want you to find them. And it took some digging to find a survivor contract. What they are what they are allowed to do and what they own in perpetuity throughout the entire universe is wow. Right. Wow. It's surprising somebody hasn't brought a lawsuit for that in this country, isn't it?

I haven't heard of that. I haven't heard of anybody doing that. Well, when you read the whole contract and I'm not a lawyer. So there was a lot of it where I was like CBS attorneys say what? But when you read the whole contract, the takeaway is basically going to be on TV. Sign it. And then you're then never another peep out of you.

The way that they can come for you and destroy you for violating or breaching any of it. Here's a little nugget that's not in this episode about the survivor contract that I thought was interesting here in the Internet age. So you're a contestant and you want to be on Survivor. And let's say you have a website. Maybe you're a personal trainer and you have a website called Bodies by Alex.

You have to shut that down. CBS puts a website under construction flag on it. You have to shut it down and you have to keep it shut down until after your season airs. And then you better be careful what you put on it because they're watching. You're not allowed to disclose anything. And you're not allowed to disclose anything until the whole show goes away forever.

Not just your season. That's a lot. That whole business about they can use it any which way they want. So let's go back to the first season, the notorious first season of Survivor. Remember that dude Richard Hatch? Richard Hatch is dead. And so he's gone. He's somewhere else in the universe where even a CBS lawyer can't get him.

He's dead and gone. He got up to heaven and people said, can you tell it now? I can't. I still can't. He can't. He can't because it's throughout the universe for all time, which I mean, I have to say, if you're the lawyer that put that wording in, you must have left yourself sick that day. But CBS owns the Richard Hatch that was on Survivor and all of the information and material and assets of lie detector tests and psychology tests and goodness knows what all.

They own that. If CBS ever wanted to make a movie about Richard Hatch on Survivor, they have every right to do that. And neither he nor his estate can ask for a nickel. Isn't that something to behold? It really is. And that's true for everyone who signs that contract. It's man. It's wild. Like I never had any desire to put on a loincloth and eat bugs and have strangers yell at me.

So I was in no danger of signing a Survivor contract. Can I tell you that Richard Hatch is still alive? Richard Hatch, the actor, has died, just to be clear. Oh, so Richard Hatch from Survivor is still alive? Survivor is still alive. Yeah. Well, you know what? I can say anything I want. He's not allowed to say anything back.

Go for it, Sherry. In perpetuity and throughout the universe. Right, right. Wow. I mean, you're SOL, and you are not smarter than a network television law firm that wrote this contract. So I thought that was interesting that they kind of know they have you by the sword. What happened to that Richard Hatch, by the way, is he had tax evasion.

He didn't pay the taxes on it, and I think he did like four years in prison or something like that. Damn. Damn. You know what? Instead of not paying Survivor taxes, you should have just found it on Amazon.com. You don't have to pay a nickel, and everybody thinks you're a rock star. Oh, Richard. Oh, Richard Hatch. So back to Nasubi, Tomoaki Hamatsu, I mean, when you look at that, it's indefensible.

And the fact that you can go on YouTube, and so much of this content is out there. This man being tortured for entertainment is still out there. Tomiaki doesn't speak English, and we want to thank Kary "Doc" Bowser for voicing Nasubi. And, you know, so there was no, it didn't make sense to put his dialogue in here in his native Japanese, because we wouldn't know what he was saying.

But he can't escape it. Like it's, the Nippon TV didn't even like, oh, well, you know what? Damn, now that we know how this played out and how it looks, we should probably remove these assets from the Internet. Not doing that, are they? They didn't. And it's just heartbreaking. And if you don't have Hulu, see if you can't steal a friend's login, because the contestant is a really, really, it's terrific.

It's a really interesting documentary. I've been obsessed with this guy since that day when we were sitting in the studio. Our day job, the radio show, was over, and we were sitting there talking, and it just hit the news. So it was all over like AP and UPI and all that. And Max and I were like, do you think that, were they feed?

No, they couldn't have been feeding him, because he lost all that weight. And he was eating, the eating of the dog food was the one thing that I really remembered about that. And that's how he was getting nourishment, was the dog food. Raw rice, dry Purina One. I mean, this is how you treat a human being. And what was so sad to me in the beginning when they first put him in the room, like, okay, if this is your scam, we've all seen reality TV shows.

Put him in the apartment, stock the fridge, and tell him, when this runs out, you're on your own, buddy, so you better start winning contests. They threw him in that room with nothing, nothing. And it was production assistants, staffers on the show that felt terrible that this guy was going days without eating, and they were slipping him crackers.

And Tiltagio, the producer, was like, no more crackers for him. That's not the show. Somewhere, El Chapo's going, na-na-na, boo-boo, I get food. And he's been complaining about his conditions there. He's complained about it. I just read something the other day that he was complaining about his conditions there. I'm sorry, he's a bad guy.

He's never getting out, and he shouldn't. The guys in Range 13, which is the most secure unit at the Supermax in Florence, whoa. That's where Robert Hansen was. He was the FBI guy. He died, I think, last year. He was the spy that was passing along secrets and caused the death of many people by way of the Russians. He was there.

Yeah, what happens in Range 13? It's all the same stuff that happens everywhere else, you know, the reinforced concrete cell, the plumbing. It's ingenious the way they've figured out the plumbing at the ADX in Colorado, the way you can't clog it, you can't sabotage it. But these guys are stared at. It's like something out of a movie, like a futuristic prison movie.

These guys are monitored every breath they take, 24-7. And even the inmates that are a step down from that are all by themselves every single day for 23 hours a day until that one hour when they're allowed to walk inside that concrete pit that looks like an empty and ground swimming pool. They do have television. And they have their television channels at ADX.

I think they have Netflix, although it's like not the full menu, right? And they have a couple other channels. So they do have TV. They don't have to just sit there and stare at their hands for 23 hours a day. But it's brutal. All I can hear is my mother's voice ringing in my ears. Mister, you go in there, you sit by yourself, and you think about what you've done.

You know what else your mother would say right now? Well, if they didn't want to sit alone in a concrete box for 23 hours a day, they should have gotten a government job instead of being a criminal. That's right. The other thing, you were talking about Eastern State Penitentiary at the beginning of it. And I've been to Eastern State Penitentiary, not as an inmate.

No, it closed in the 1970s. I'll be real clear about that. But it closed in the 1970s, and it's in Philadelphia. You can go and actually tour it. And they have a cell that Al Capone was in because he was there for a period of time. And when he was there, he had a nice bed, a dresser. He had an oriental rug on the floor.

I mean, he was in prison, but it was a pretty good situation for him. But if you're ever to Philadelphia, you think you want something to see. See the Liberty Bell. See all the touristy stuff. But go to Eastern State Penitentiary because, first of all, it's haunted. It's spooky as hell, but it is so informative, and you'll learn so many things by going there.

Isn't it fascinating to learn that that was where the idea of solitary confinement was born and that solitary confinement initially wasn't meant to be a punishment but an opportunity for reform? Right. That if you were alone in thoughtful contemplation of your own behavior for long enough, that your impulse would be to change for the better.

I want to shout out the Quakers, and I don't mean the Oats, for their unwavering faith in humanity that they believed that that would be the case. So solitary was not meant to be the punishment that we think of it today. It's one of the things that we still are trying to understand. Lawmakers want to have stiffer penalties for things and put people away for longer as a deterrent, and that looks good on the outside.

But the reality of the situation is it costs like about $40,000 a year per man to house them in a prison. And if you're not doing anything to try to help the behavior, if you're not offering any of that kind of thing, it's very difficult. As you talked about, it's not just the transition of not being socialized anymore, but it's whatever behavior got you in there, that behavior is still underneath everything else.

You haven't learned any. You have no tools for dealing with not returning to that now. And so then we just turn them out and go, why is the recidivism rate so high? Well, it's because they haven't really learned anything. We haven't done anything to actually rehabilitate. And it turns out that the Quakers had their hearts in the right place.

And maybe in the early days of the Philadelphia system at Eastern State Penitentiary, when they had big cells with lots of windows that looked out onto the street, lots of natural light, their own little walking yards. People in that environment, perhaps some of them did rethink their choices and reform. Who knows, right? But the way we do it now, the way that happens, is not at all what the Quakers had in mind.

And this brings us to, we forget. We think that once we grow up and we're adults, we are who we are. We forget how plastic and dynamic and malleable the human brain is. And that if you deprive a person of certain things for long enough, the changes that happen at the organic level in the brain make it difficult for that person to ever come back.

That's where the wayfinding and the conversation and so many, many things that we take for granted and don't think twice about. Those are things that happen because we're in community with each other. We're not meant to be alone. And for some people who had extended periods in solitary, and it's hard to find someone in this modern age that spent as much time in solitary as Nasubi did on that game show.

But people who've had that experience, they're changed and they're damaged by it. And I have, I got nothing for El Chapo or, you know, Spooky Mahoof the Shoe Bomber. You always called him Spooky Mahoof. But those guys, you know what? I don't care whether they ever get out again. They're not going to. I don't care if those guys ever get out again.

But a majority of them, a majority of people who are in prison, both men and women, they're going to get out again and reenter society. And I'm not saying that they shouldn't be there. I'm not saying they shouldn't be penalized. So please don't hear that. But at the same time, if you're going to do this, you've got to figure out some kind of way to do it better.

And hopefully we're evolving. I'd like to think that we are. But solitary confinement is still a punishment in prison. I mean, it's still 90 days in the hole. It's common. Yeah, it's common. Despite the fact that we know that, you know, it doesn't really work. Like it doesn't contribute whatsoever to rehabilitation. But I guess if we were going to be super honest, this is the point where we would go, our prisons aren't really designed for rehabilitation, are they?

No, no. Our for profit prison system is designed for incarceration, not rehabilitation. Sure. Can I just say something? If somebody said to me, Max, for 90 days, you're going to go in this room, they're going to bring you food. You don't have to do anything and no one's going to talk to you. I'm going to tell you that might be a goal.

Oh, Max, I just recently I just recently had five days of covid quarantine because I was sick and it was me, some stuffed animals, the cats coming and going and my thoughts. And I felt like one of those women in a Victorian novel that had been sent away from nervous exhaustion. I needed the rest. I did. Not so bad. Yeah, I just gosh, you know, the story we've talked that we talked about it on the radio show a long time ago and I never kind of never let go of it and and wanted to tell it again for all the people who won't ever watch that documentary on Hulu, who've never heard of this man's story.

Just so you know that like when you're watching reality TV, it's real and it's entertaining. But there's stuff happening that the cameras don't show. Right. And people are experiencing real sort of catastrophic breakdowns. And the cameras don't show that unless it's Big Brother, in which case that's the point of the show.

Right. And that reminds me when I was hunting down contracts to look at what these poor contestants agree to. It's sort of it's sort of kind of understood in the business that you really shouldn't go anywhere near Big Brother if you're not really, really sane and emotionally sound, because that show, the whole point of that show is to drive you crazy.

You've watched it, right? Absolutely. Yeah. See, Survivor, you got to, you know, you got to be able to, I don't know, eat a raw fish and climb a tree. The Amazing Race, you got to get from here to there. Naked and Afraid, you got to be naked sometimes and afraid sometimes. But Big Brother ain't but one point of Big Brother. And that's to take your sanity and your self-respect.

Yeah. So, yeah. Thank you for listening to Nasubi's story. And think about like, think about what that guy went through and how he tried to take that and turn it into something beautiful in his life. And the way he did that, Max, was something we've talked about before amongst ourselves. And that is, he tried to be of service to others, which brings us full circle into what human beings are and what we need to thrive.

We don't need all the power and all the praise and all the money and all the privilege. We need each other. We need to be helped by each other and we need to help each other. That's how we save ourselves. And this man, after 15 months of being starved, degraded, humiliated, he was the talk and the laughingstock of Japan.

This man came out of that experience not bitter, not angry, not broken, but with this like really profound understanding that his way back to recovery wasn't to punish people for what had happened to him, but to try to be of service to people who needed him. I mean, if that doesn't just, yeah. And if there is a hell and you end up there, stay away from Toshio Tsuchiya, because he and the devil are going to put on a talent show. It ain't going to go well for you.

That's it for this episode of True Weird Stuff. Next week, we take a look at a doctor who contributed so many incredible things to the field of child psychology. But you know how it is. Here comes the CIA with their great big bags of LSD. And before you know it, you're experimenting on children. Shock Doc on the next True Weird Stuff.

And if you listen to us on Apple Podcasts, hit the plus button in the top right corner. And now it helps an independent podcast like ours to get discovered. And we really appreciate it if you subscribe, rate and review True Weird Stuff. Hit our website True Weird Stuff dot com for show notes and photos and videos when we have it and bonus content.

Everything true weird is waiting for you at True Weird Stuff dot com. And follow True Weird Stuff on Instagram and Twitter. True Weird Stuff is a Now! Media production. Our executive producer is Anthony Garcia. The show is written and hosted by me, Sheri Lynch, along with my deeply weird director, Max Sweeten. Our equally odd producer is Kary Bowser. Additional production by the mysterious Stephen Call.

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