The craziness of Japanese game shows is a global joke, and The Contestant, a must-see documentary now on Hulu, will help you understand why.

The film, from British director Clair Titley, tells the story of a man named Tomoaki Hamatsu who was quickly nicknamed Nasubi, or eggplant, because his head was supposedly long, like an eggplant. The nickname was only the beginning of the indignities inflicted on Nasubi. Soon his life was turned into a real-life Truman Show — before the release of the 1998 Jim Carrey movie about a man who doesn’t know he’s being watched by millions.

Titley learned about Nasubi while researching another project, and like many reality TV viewers, she couldn’t look away.

“I just wanted to know more and more, and the more I looked, the more kind of crazy angles I found about it,” she tells Eric Steuer in our latest Actual Facts podcast. “A lot of what I had found online was borderline derogatory sometimes about Japanese culture: A bit of point and laugh, ‘Look at those crazy Japanese, and isn’t he stupid to have stayed in there?’ And then that was it. No one really asked him any more questions.”

You can listen to our Actual Facts podcast interview with Titley on Apple or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts, or here:

What Happened to Nasubi

In 1998, Toshio Tsuchiya, producer of the hit Japanese TV series Susunu! Denpa Shonen (roughly translated as Do Not Proceed! Crazy Youth!) was looking to shake the idea that his successful series was just a kind of travel game show. And so he invited dozens of young people to audition for a new experiment he had envisioned for Denpa Shonen.

Soon Nasubi entered his plans. Growing up in Fukushima, Japan — when he wasn’t moving frequently because of his father’s job as a cop — he was mocked by classmates because of the shape of his head. He aspired to join the entertainment industry, and left for Tokyo. His mother’s advice as he left was to please never take off his clothes on camera.

But that’s the first thing he did.

After beating others at an audition for for Denpa Shonen through what Tsuchiya describes as “luck” — good or bad, we’ll later wonder — Nasubi is taken to a room filled with magazines, a radio, a phone and other basic items and ordered to strip.

Tsuchiya told him most of the footage would never be aired, later explaining to Titley’s documentary crew, “When someone hears that they stop paying attenton to the camera. That’s when you can really capture a lot.”

And he does.

Nasubi is told that in order to win the game, he must win at least 1 million yen — about $7,000 in U.S. dollars — in prize competitions held by radio stations and magazines. The prizes from these competitions will also be his source of food and clothing, assuming he wins any.

Until then, the producers feed him crackers to keep him alive.

Also Read: 5 Documentary Recommendations, and Interviews With the Filmmakers

He has only a cushion to cover himself. The show’s producers also cover his genitalia with an image of an eggplant. A BBC correspondent explains that the frequent sight of the eggplant on the show is the reason the eggplant emoji has come to be internet shorthand for a penis.

It is 17 days before he wins his first prize — jelly. Once it arrives, the crackers stop. Soon he is winning — and eating — dog food.

He is also losing his mind.

Through extensive editing. the show’s producers expunge his loneliness and pain and add silly graphics and voiceover for comic effect. (The voiceover is reproduced in The Contestant by a comedy star who is an ideal choice.) Through the magic of television. Nasubi’s stir-craziness, exhaustion and hunger come off as innocent, good-natured goofiness.

The Horrors of The Contestant

By this point in Nasubi’s story, The Contestant is only a third of the way through. And we’ve barely described all the insanity so far. There is much more to come.

And Nasubi doesn’t know that anyone is watching.

In her research for The Contestant, Titley met ’90s viewers of Denpa Shonen who didn’t realize Nasubi hadn’t consented to be filmed.

“They genuinely thought that he was in on it in some way. And a lot of them did actually say they felt a bit guilty that they hadn’t really questioned it,” she says.

One of the few viewers who knows the real Tomoaki Hamatsu recognizes the spectacle as “bizarre and grotesque.”

But it is also new: As Contestant reminds us, it aired before reality competitions like Big Brother, before fairly regular people could appear on television.

As Tsuchiya notes, Nasubi could have left anytime. His door was unlocked.

But as he conveniently leaves out: Nasubi was naked and had no idea where he was.

And yet: the film isn’t just a shocked recounting of the insane spectacle lightly summarized here. Nasubi, as we are reassured by his own on-camera interviews, is alive, and looks good.

But the film has many more surprises in store, and its to Titley’s great credit that she doesn’t just focus on the most ghastly period of Nasubi’s life, but on what comes after.

In these moments, The Contestant becomes not just shocking and compulsively watchable — which it certainly is — but also transcendent, and moving. It lifts you from shock and outrage to the higher emotions, through the eyes of a man who has endured, unwittingly, the eyes of his whole country.

Main image: The Contestant