“Black Box Diaries”: Itō Shiori’s Oscar-Nominated Japan #MeToo Documentary

A Decade Fighting for Justice

In April 2015, Itō Shiori was a 25-year-old intern at the Japan office of Thomson Reuters Corporation. She met journalist Yamaguchi Noriyuki, then the Washington Bureau Chief for Japanese broadcaster TBS, at a bar in Tokyo. She later alleged that he raped her at a hotel after their meeting. Yamaguchi has denied the accusation, saying that any intercourse was consensual.

The title of Itō’s harrowing and powerful documentary, Black Box Diaries, is taken from something a prosecutor told her. He claimed that the evidence in her case was insufficient, and that the night’s events would remain unknowable. “Because it was in a ‘black box,’ we will never know what really happened,” he said.

But “black box” is also Itō’s metaphor for how sexual assault is hidden and ignored by Japanese society. According to a 2014 Cabinet Office Survey that Itō cites in her film, only 4.3% of Japanese rape victims make a report to police.

One reason for this is the low likelihood of criminal conviction. In many cases, victims either find it impossible to provide sufficient evidence, or are pressured to settle without going to court. To date, Yamaguchi has not been charged with a criminal offence. In 2019, however, a civil court ordered him to pay Itō ¥ 3.3 million in damages.

Another factor is how police treat victims. In her 2017 book Black Box, Itō recounts how she was forced to re-enact the rape “using a life-size doll, in a jūdō hall filled with only male investigators.”

One more reason is the abuse and stigmatization that victims face. Frustrated by the authority’s refusal to charge Yamaguchi, in May 2017 Itō took her accusations public with a press conference at the Tokyo District Court.

The presser was packed with Japanese journalists, but only a few reported her allegations. Meanwhile, the online backlash against Itō was swift and fierce. She was accused of being a North Korean spy, and that her actions were politically motivated. Commentors even accused her of being a prostitute, criticizing her for appearing at the press conference with the top button of her shirt undone.

Itō Shiori in Black Box Diaries. (Courtesy Harigaya Tsutomu)

Pain and Solidarity

Speaking at the British Film Institute in London in 2024, Itō explained that she started her journalistic investigation of the assault as a “coping mechanism”; a way to distance herself from her trauma. The results of that investigation became her book Black Box.

It was after her 2017 press conference that she decided to make a documentary. As she explained at the BFI, she had “crossed the line as a journalist” to become the subject of her own investigation. And bringing her own emotions as a survivor into the story helped her face up to those emotions, she said.

Much of Itō’s film, which was made over the course of eight years from over 400 hours of footage, was recorded on her cell phone. This intimate filming style, and Ito’s unfiltered readiness to share all, makes the documentary both powerful and, at times, difficult to watch.

It is impossible not to be moved by her courage and determination, despite the desperate and all-too-apparent toll it takes on her. She does not shrink from showing her own trauma and pain.

Particularly moving is the solidarity Itō receives from other women. In one scene, she chats with elderly women protestors outside the Japanese Diet. Their excitement and delight at meeting her is starkly contrasted by another scene of an anonymous female voice hurling insults at her on the street. In yet another scene she talks to a group of senior women journalists, one of whom shares how she too had “a similar experience” to Itō as a young journalist.

One shocking contrast is between two telephone calls Itō films herself receiving.

The first is from an investigator who worked on Itō’s case and eventually, after much persuasion, offers to help her, albeit anonymously. The other is from the doorman who was working at the hotel the night she was raped.

The prosecutor, who is drunk, “jokingly” asks her to marry him and pesters her to come for a meal. Itō’s shock and dismay are obvious. But when the doorman offers to come forward as a witness in her case, publicly and at the risk of his job, Itō records herself breaking down into tears.

The documentary also includes footage of Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan member Yuniko Michiyoshi doggedly questioning Prime Minister Abe Shinzō in the Diet about Itō’s case. Itō has alleged a political cover-up to protect her attacker Yamaguchi. As a well-connected journalist, he was both a friend of Abe and his biographer. Pointedly, Abe refused to answer.

In December 2019, Yamaguchi held a press conference at the Foreign Correspondent’s Club of Japan, where he not only denied the rape accusations again, but claimed he suffered PTSD due to them. In footage of the presser in Itō’s documentary, a Western journalist sitting close by can be seen rolling his eyes.

Itō (left) in Black Box Diaries. (Courtesy The Film Collaborative)

Controversy over Sources

Itō’s documentary, which was released in the United States and Britain in October 2024, has been shown at over 50 different film festivals in more than 30 countries. Yet, despite such international recognition, including an Oscar nomination, it has still not been shown in Japan.

Puzzlingly perhaps to those outside Japan, the media conversation about the documentary has focused on legal wrangles over CCTV footage used in the documentary, much to the detraction of the bigger issues of why Itō’s attacker was not prosecuted and why other journalists were reluctant to cover her case.

Journalist Jake Adelstein, who was one of the first people to write about Itō’s case in English, points out that no court ruling has banned the documentary and there are no official censorship laws preventing it from being shown. “The real reason it hasn’t been screened is the same reason Shiori’s case was buried for so long: media self-censorship and fear of retaliation from powerful political and media elites,” says Adelstein.

The Face of Japan’s #MeToo Movement

In 2020, Time magazine selected Itō as one of its 100 most influential people of the year, describing her as having “forever changed life for Japanese women with her brave accusation of sexual violence against her harasser.” Itō has been called the face of Japan’s #MeToo. However, in Japan, the movement has taken a different course than in the United States and other countries.

Itō published her book the same year that allegations of sexual assault were made against US film producer Harvey Weinstein. But Itō faced backlash for speaking out, and the voices of other Japanese victims remained muted.

Over the following years, the Japanese #MeToo movement has tended to focus on softer targets, such as #kutoo, a movement to free women from the requirement to wear high heels for work.

Nevertheless, there has been progress on reform of Japan’s outdated sexual crime legislation. In 2017, rape laws were updated for the first time in over a century, making it possible for men to legally report rape. In 2023, the age of consent in Japan was raised from 13 to 16 and rape was newly defined as “nonconsensual sexual intercourse,” weakening a previous requirement for victims to prove physical force or coercion.

And in the almost 10 years since Itō was assaulted, several other scandals have come to light.

In March 2023, the BBC broadcast Predator: The Secret Scandal of J-Pop, a documentary that exposed the sexual abuse of boy stars by talent-agency impresario Johnny Kitagawa. The allegations against Kitagawa were decades old but had been studiously ignored by the Japanese media. Nevertheless, the program sparked a long-overdue reckoning that eventually led to allegations by hundreds of victims and the fall of Japan’s most powerful talent agency. It also brought the taboo issue of sexual abuse of boys and men to public notice.

More recently, celebrity Nakai Masahiro, who rose to fame as the leader of the hugely popular boy band SMAP, was accused of sexually assaulting a woman at a party allegedly organized by broadcaster Fuji Television. The resulting scandal, which prompted an advertising boycott of the media company, highlighted the issue of abuse of women in the media.

Adelstein says that if Itō had not stood up and forced the conversation about sexual violence in Japan, it is very possible that the Johnny Kitagawa scandal would have remained an open secret rather than an international headline. “The reason the Fuji TV situation is happening now… all of this is because Shiori’s case forced people to start challenging the old ways of looking the other way. Thanks to Shiori and a few other brave survivors, the conversation has changed. It’s not a full #MeToo wave, but it’s a crack in the dam. And once the dam breaks, there’s no going back.”

Trailer

(Originally published in English. Banner photo: Itō Shiori in a screenshot from Black Box Diaries. Courtesy The Film Collaborative.)