This website claims the show was for real, so I believe it, but was this accruate? Seems he must have had more food that this implies and the actor had some knowledge of what he was signing up for.
The show really existed. Not on it’s own, but as a segment on a weekly comedy program called Dempa Shonen. The producers probably got the idea following the popularity of Saruganseki, a pair of young hopeful comedians who accepted a challenge on Dempa Shonen to hitchhike from Hong Kong to London. The success was probably sue to the fact that 1: it was a fresh idea, and 2: the pair actually went through some real-world hardships, had to survive by actually working and making friends with the people they encountered, and had visibly matured by the time they reached the finish. Later acts that tried similar challenges knew more about what they were getting into, so the whole thing seemed less sincere. Anyway, with Nasubi, the producers decided that, instead of sending people far away and having them find their way home, it would be cheaper to try the opposite: lock a guy in a room with nothing but contest entry forms and giveaway fliers, and keep him there, surviving on his winnings, until he wins enough to buy his way out. Nasubi was also a hit, mainly because he was good at being funny for six months sitting buck-naked in a completely empty room.
But was it real? Good question. No one saw him walking around outside the studio during the show’s run, and it was popular enough that some of the gossip mags certainly would have been interested in looking for him. Plus, he was a pretty distinctive-looking guy.
However, in my experience, Japanese networks have no qualms about filming rehersed sketches and presenting them as live, spontaneous reactions. I was on a couple of shows that specialized in “man on the street” comedy bits. They didn’t just let the interviewees know ahead of time it was for a comedy show; they called up talent agencies and held auditions, telling us what the questions were and picking the ones who gave the best responses in the studio, then having the writers added their own touches to our answers, which we then read in front of the cameras out on the sidewalk the next day, with multiple takes until we got everything right. Every segment on the show was like this, including a quiz supposedly given to drunken office workers on their way home late at night.
So basically, I’ve got a feeling he probably endured a lot over the course of the show, and quite possibly had to live on the set (or at least in the studio building) the whole time, but I doubt he was put through as much (near-starvation, for example) as the show implies.
Strictly speaking, Nasubi doesn’t mean eggplant, “nasu” does: “Nasubi” is closer to “eggplant head”, I guess because he looks like an eggplant.
Plus, they used a little eggplant graphic to cover up Nasubi, Jr.
What Sublight said, and…
That’s wrong, nasubi is just another word for nasu. As a matter of fact, it’s just a different pronunciation of the same kanji.
It should also be noted that the Japanese have been doing “reality” type TV shows for a long time, and they’re a lot more outrageous than anything you’d expect to see on TV in more litigous countries.
I remember watching a show in the eighties that Fear Factor obviously borrowed a few pages from-- the stunts that people had to do were designed to appear absurd, but they were dangerous and people were banged around a lot and often obviously quite hurt.
Even their “Candid Camera” shows left your jaw in your lap a lot. For example, they set up one gag where a guy in a Rock Monster costume with a flat back was fitted into a recess in the road that perfectly conformed to the costume, so that he was totally undetectable. They’d wait until bicycle traffic was really heavy and then have him jump up and scare the hell out of everyone. Of course, this resulted in a lot of spills, and downed people being run over by other cyclists, multiple pile-ups, etc. People of all ages, very few helmets. People got hurt. And they did it again and again and again, so they’d have lots of good clips to put a laugh track over.
When you see it (here) the natural reaction is “But they can’t do that!” They can. They did.
If you think Nasubi is unlikely because they’d get the pants sued off them, it might not be the case.
You know, apart from the injuries of course, that sounds fucking hilarious. I don’t suppose there’s a clip of it anywhere on the internet, is there?
By the way, I once started a thread to ask this same question and, IIRC, the general consensus was something like, “uhruh.”
Yeah, I was laughing reading that.
The craziest thing I heard of was forcing people to immerse themselves in scalding water for ~30 secs in order to pitch whatever product their company sells.
I also saw a couple of clips from videos (can’t remember what the genre was called) where a group of young Japanese hoodlums would randomly accost some woman on the street and have their way with her :eek: At first I kind of freaked out seeing it but that was before I realized they must have staged it, I mean the women didn’t put up much of a fight (didn’t scream or anything just stood there).
Some time ago, I was watching a show where they were talking about tv in America and how, while in the 90s, sitcoms ruled supreme, nowadays it was reality shows. They showed exerpts from the Fear Factor and the guests went: “whoa, American tv has gotten pretty bad!” One guy commented, “yeah, but we used to be pretty bad too!”
The lesson from this is that nowadays, Japanese tv is a lot more tame than it used to be. It’s still kind of over the top, but you don’t see as much crazy dangerous stuff as you used to say 10, 15 years ago.
What the heck is uhruh supposed to mean.
I think it’s “freedom” in Swahili.
Either that, or it’s an Australian wingless bird that eats baby dingos. I can’t remember which.
Uhruh?
If you re-arrange the letters, it becomes the third word that ends in -gry. Really!
I remember reading about Nasubi in my edition of Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader… wish I, too, could get some clips of it!
You can see still caps of the segment on Denpa Shonen’s website:
http://www.ntv.co.jp/denpa/luck/
It’s in Japanese, but just click the links on the left frame for more pics.
Shrug your shoulders and say it out loud. Oh, screw it, it’s supposed to mean “I don’t know.”
Thanks, jovan. Nearly all the Japanese TV I’ve seen is from the eighties – I guess I just assumed it stayed about the same, which is pretty silly, on reflection. (I remember a thing or two about Canadian TV in the eighties… heh heh.)
That would be Super Jockey. The opening half of the show used to have Beat Takeshi running a little ‘comedy’ segment that usually involved him beating the living crap out of a bunch of apprentice comedians. The bathtub segment was fun, though, particularly since it started with some young model being tossed a bikini and told to go change behind a small curtain. She then had 30 seconds to get changed before the curtain fell to the ground. Not everyone made it.