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Social Propriety & Reality TV. Have you heard of Nasubi?

Qlip

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I'm sitting in my room filling out resumes and I'm prompted to think about Nasubi. Have you heard of him? I read about him back in 2000, back in the shocking advent of the upcoming American version of the TV show 'Survivor'. It wasn't so shocking that the Japanese had in 1998, already taken some poor sap and put him in a sadistic survival situation for national entertainment purposes.

Wikipedia - Nasubi
Tomoaki Hamatsu (浜津 智明 Hamatsu Tomoaki?, born August 3, 1975), better known as Nasubi (なすび?), is a Japanese comedian who was locked up in an apartment for "Susunu! Denpa Shōnen" (January 1998—March 2002), a Japanese reality television show on Nippon Television after winning a lottery for a "show business related job". He was forced to enter mail-in sweepstakes until he won ¥1 million (about $10,000 USD). During this time, he was made to wear no clothes, was cut off from outside communication and broadcasting, and had nothing to keep him company except magazines.

The synopsis above doesn't mention that not only did he have to win his freedom, he also had to win his food with the mail in contests ubiquitous in Japan.

I remember being scandalized reading about this. It paved the way for easy adoption of the now popular phrase, 'only in Japan'. But, now, thinking about Nasubi, I'm not entirely sure that we haven't done it on American TV on some cable network, maybe more than once already. And it makes me wonder if my, our, attitudes towards what is proper to show happening to seemingly 'real' people on TV has some sort of effect on what we think is acceptable in real life. It makes me wonder what has changed in America since 2000 along with whatever it is that made this kind of entertainment acceptable and commonplace.

Now in 2013, I'm actually able to pull an episode from You Tube, which I'm excited about even though it's not subtitled.

 

Lark

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Jun 21, 2009
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Orwell felt that this kind of thing would only be made feasible or possible by the debasing of english culture, it was in a bit of a nationally chauvinistic essay all the same but he did think that the english speaking world were more concerned about privacy, hobbies, diversions etc. which made a singular totalitarianism impossible or even intrusive collectivism possible.

The thing about so called reality TV is that there were a couple of reality TV shows in the UK before the invention of Big Brother, which has existed for a while elsewhere, TV shows like the real world, which was a documentary tracking students and a student house, which pretty much showed how ill prepared for independent life and university a lot of students were and rallied people behind cuts in higher education grants, tuition fees and social support for students.

Big Brother was crap TV and I always thought it. I always thought it was very different from these sorts of Japanese TVs which I find interesting. They wouldnt ever be allowed here in the UK, a lot of the randomly awesome shows which are a staple of Japanese TV only get the odd screening here in the UK as cultural oddities or voiced over by that guy who used to star in Red Dwarf.
 
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