75th Issue: Ennigaldi-Nanna's Museum, Nasubi, and Gangubai Kothewali
Welcome back to another issue of my newsletter! I’ll jump right into it.
I’ve been interested in reality TV lately, and I ran across this guy called Tomoaki Hamatsu also known as Nasubi, who appeared on a reality show named Susunu! Denpa Shonen. The show was basically a challenge where he had to stay alone with no clothes or any other possessions in an empty apartment and try to survive by whatever he could get from entering mail in sweepstakes (they did give him magazines so he could use the sweepstakes forms form there). His goal was to get one million yen total, and he took 335 days to do so.
He was known as Nasubi because that means eggplant, apparently his face is shaped like an eggplant and his genitals were covered for TV with an animated eggplant. Nasubi thought that the whole thing was being recorded and would air later, but it was actually live-streamed. He won food and all kinds of other things but never clothes or anything to cut his hair or shave with. The show got really popular and he was blindfolded and moved to a new apartment due to paparazzi and fans figuring out where he was.
Once Nasubi reached his goal of one million yen, he was blindfolded and given his clothes, taken to Korea, where he got to ride on theme park rides and eat some Korean barbecue, but when he was done they took off his clothes and blindfolded him again and put him in another apartment and said the new goal was to win enough money to fly back to Japan. He was given the choice to opt out but he decided to do it. After that, he was taken to another apartment in Japan, and he thought the challenge would keep going, but the walls of the apartment fell away to reveal a TV show set with a live studio audience. That confused him because he didn’t know the whole thing was being live-streamed. The show went on for 15 months. Nasubi wrote a diary that was published and became a bestseller. The TV show broke records. There’s a documentary about the whole thing on Hulu called The Contestant if you’re interested, and a lot more detail on the Wikipedia page as well.
Shifting topics completely, do you ever think about ancient museums? I saw a tumblr post about Ennigaldi Nanna’s museum, which is the oldest known public museum, from 530 BCE. Basically this princess named Ennigaldi, whose father was Nabonidus the last king of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, maintained a museum in what is now Iraq. Ennigaldi lived in the same complex ant the museum. Her dad, who could be considered the first known archaeologist, taught her to appreciate ancient artifacts and helped her make her educational museum. Some were from as long ago as the 20th century BCE in Mesopotamia and they were either excavated by Nabonidus, Nebuchadnezzar, or Ennigaldi herself.
Ennigaldi’s museum was discovered in 1925 when an archaeologist who was excavating the palace/temple compound found a bunch of artifacts neatly arranged and accompanied by clay museum labels in three different languages, including Sumerian. I like Ennigaldi. I wish we knew more about her.
Finally, I came across the Wikipedia page of a woman named Gangubai Harjeevandas, who was also known as Gangubai Kothewali – I’ll just call her Gangubai. She was well-known in Mumbai in the 1960s. When she was sixteen, the guy she was supposed to marry sold her into prostitution, and she became a pimp, selling drugs and making connections in the underworld. By the later part of her life she was meeting with Jawaharlal Nehru to talk about how to improve sex workers’ living conditions. Gangubai didn’t like the way her pimp was treating her, and went to another pimp, who beat him up for her. She began working for him, and that’s how she became a brothel madam. She was often called mother by everyone respectfully because she tried to help women who had gotten stuck into prostitution to go home. She also looked out for orphans of prostitutes and tried to help them too.
There’s a book about her called Mafia Queens of Mumbai by Hussain Zaidi I’m trying to get ahold of, and a 2022 movie with Alia Bhatt called Gangubai Kathiawadi I really want to watch.
That’s all for now! Thanks for reading!