Naked, alone and living on dog food – all for a TV show that gripped a nation Nasubi appeared on Japanese TV in 1998, before The Truman Show and Big Brother In 1998, a Japanese man was stripped naked and left alone in an almost-empty apartment as part of a challenge for a reality TV show. Tomoaki Hamatsu, known as Nasubi, was left with only a pen, some blank postcards, a telephone and rack full of magazines. But he was not there to read. The concept of the show was to see if a human being could survive on competition prizes alone. In order to win the challenge, the value of the prizes he won had to reach a certain financial threshold - 1m yen, around £6,000 at the time. He would not emerge for 15 months, following a gradual descent into depression and mania, driven by hunger and isolation. Nearly three decades later, Nasubi's ordeal is being revisited as part of a new film that has just screened at the Sheffield Documentary Festival. "I came across his story when I
