Tomoaki Hamatsu lived 335 days completely naked in an apartment without windows. He thought he was completely alone when he discovered that his life was being broadcast live to millions of people.
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The incident took place in 1998, when the Japanese man participated in a test for a TV reality show. He didn’t know any real details about the program, but his hopes of achieving fame as a comedian motivated him, and Hamatsu made it onto the show.
He was blindfolded and placed in a tiny apartment, where he was instructed to remove all his clothes. He lived there for months while thinking he was being filmed for a program that would air later.
Hamatsu had neither food nor company, but he had a small camera that he had to use to film himself every two hours. He had to try to live off whatever he could win by participating in magazine and radio station contests.
He quickly started losing weight due to the lack of food, and the producers gave him bread and water for a brief period. However, this “privilege” stopped when he began winning edible prizes in the contests, even though he had nothing to cook them with.
When Hamatsu finally won prizes worth a million yen, he was taken out of the room for the first time in 335 days. He was given clothes and a blindfold to wear in the car and was then taken to South Korea.
There, he was placed in another small room and instructed to win enough prizes from contests to pay for his flight back to Japan. Hamatsu nearly gave up, but a producer convinced him to stay.
Four months later, he was back in Japan, but there was still one more moment ahead. Hamatsu was taken to another small room and instructed to remove his clothes. After doing so, the walls of the room collapsed, and Hamatsu was suddenly confronted with a live audience.
It was at that moment that he realized he had been on TV the entire time. The shocking experience Hamatsu went through later inspired a Hulu documentary titled The Contestant, which features interviews with Hamatsu and his family.
Hamatsu even compared what he went through to the story of the movie The Truman Show starring Jim Carrey, “The only person who really understands the feeling Truman went through is me. It felt like my story.”
“His life was much easier than mine, but it was a similar situation where everyone was watching Truman and me, and we had no idea we were being observed,” he also said.
Photo and video: Reproduction/Hulu. This content was created with the help of AI and reviewed by the editorial team.
