Japanese Game Show / Torturefest Makes Fear Factor Look Like Trip To Spa

When it comes to their gameshows, the Japanese have a real bloodlust that far exceeds our humble fare of contestants eating bugs and performing such mundane tasks as bungee jumping and the like. I'm quite confident that none of the contestants in any television show here, such as Survivor or Fear Factor, could have dealt with the kind of treatment Japanese comic Nabusi dealt with:

Nippon Television's (NTV) producers have obviously never heard of the Geneva Convention. If they had, they wouldn't have treated poor Nasubi the way they did. They wouldn't have stripped him naked and shut him in an apartment, alone with no food, furniture, household goods, or entertainment. They wouldn't have kept him there for over a year until he had won $10 000 in prizes by sending in postcards to contests. They wouldn't have cut him off from the world and they would have told him that he was on nation-wide TV.

It gets much worse...you have to hand it to the Japanese, anyone who can make tackier television than us deserves a medal...however, if this is how a gameshow contestant is treated, I can't imagine what their prison system must be like.

nasubi