Nasubi, The Naked Eggplant-Man Who Lived Off Sweepstakes
tofugu.com
tofugu.com
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/529/t...
Their interviews provide additional details. Apparently the producers did feed him during the first two weeks, but only bread and water. Hamatsu did eventually have to eat dogfood. He was really forced to live naked, to the point where after the ordeal, clothes were itchy and uncomfortable, required a lot of readjusting. He was bullied into continuing when he wanted to quit.
EDIT: If Milgrim or Zimbardo were getting started today, they wouldn't be able to do any of their early work at Universities, because of ethics panels that set strict guidelines covering human subject research. They couldn't do any of it on reality TV either, because there it would be far too tame.
If we go back to the days before the internet it was possible for a competition to ask a difficult question that you couldn't 'just Google'. You would have to have the breadth and depth of 'General Knowledge' or you would need to make a trip to somewhere like the library to look up the answer. This made it so that some prizes were 'deserved', imagine you had some novelty item signed by some famous sports-person, you would have to know something about that sport to enter, consequently there was reward for those that knew their stuff.
Tie-breaker questions were also quite common, as in 'complete in less than 25 words: I use the product coz...'
Then something changed with how the competitions were 'paid for'. In the days of postcards the prize came from some sponsor, the TV production crew sifted the cards and found the ones with the correct answers, then picked out some quality tiebreaker.
So then it changed to phone lines and TXT messages. Clearly it now cost money to enter, albeit that cost being a premium rate phone number - '0898' numbers etc. Money was made off the phones, even if notionally a 'national rate' call. So the answers were 'a', 'b', 'c' with questions requiring less thought than you would think possible, e.g. for the Tour de France show a bike would be the prize and the question being 'How many wheels does a two-wheeled bicycle have?' a) 2, b) 25, c) 27.
Behind the scenes the phone lines and the organisation of the competition would be out-sourced to a company with no involvement in the production of the show. The revenue from the phone competition would be enough to cover the production costs of the show and the prize would be something the producers had acquired for free anyway.
At least in the UK it is now not really that possible to live off competition winnings, as per Eggplant Man. Quality competitions have gone and the relationship between reader/viewer and those setting the competition has completely changed. Some things (but not many) were better before the internet.
Seems I missed it being put up on Hulu at one point, but you can find some of it now (sometimes even subtitled in English).
And not eating for a week or two? Many people do that - its called 'fasting' and not especially dangerous. I fast for days at a time as I see fit.
He could have ignored them, stumbled naked into the streets of a foreign country and tried to beg for help, maybe using some form of pantomime.
Not literal locks and chains, but in the beginning, he probably didn't know what to expect, and by the end of the series, there was some strong psychological pressure keeping him there.
Leading, no doubt, to arrest, the summoning of an interpreter, and the extreme embarrassment if not prosecution of the producer or representative in SK of the show.
Seriously everyone: he must have gone through passport control in two countries to get to SK. I doubt if they let passengers through unclothed.