Director: Shiori Itô
Writer: Shiori Itô
Stars: Shiori Itô
Synopsis: Journalist Shiori Ito investigates her own sexual assault, seeking to prosecute the high-profile offender. Her quest becomes a landmark case, exposing Japan’s outdated judicial and societal systems.
“Now let me tell you my story.”
Shiori Ito is speaking to a camera phone. She’s scared but she wants to talk about the truth of her sexual assault, two years previously. She is a journalist and if she comes forward with the facts, she will be the one stigmatized. Her family discourages her. People call in to television and radio stations abusing her. Shiori Ito is making a stance in a country where making a stance is akin to proclaiming oneself a pariah.
The man who allegedly assaulted her is a senior political journalist and in the inner circle of Prime minister Abe. Ms. Ito is consistently stonewalled by the police when she tries to get proof of what occurred, so it is now up to her to run her own investigation. She begins with the driver who dropped her off at the hotel. Ms. Ito was highly intoxicated but asked the driver several times to drop her off at the station. Mr Yamaguchi, the man who had bundled her into the car, refused to let the driver stop. CCTV shows Ms. Ito and Mr. Yamaguchi get out of the car. She is barely able to stand, and he is pulling her across the hotel foyer. It is 2015. May 29th, 2017, Ms. Ito makes her public and filmed press statement at the National Press Club. From that moment she is repeatedly re-victimized and becomes ‘persona non grata’. However, she feels that if she “shuts up” she feels she will be contributing to the culture of silence for sexual assault victims in Japan.
In investigating her own rape, Ms. Ito learns she has almost no chance of bringing the man to ‘justice’, so her next recourse is to question the misogynist systems that control meting out ‘justice’ in Japan. From the Tokyo and National police to the bureaucratic government offices – including the male staffed Office for the Safety of Women, Ms. Ito finds either a wall of silence or a culture of inaction. She also becomes tangled in her own ethical dilemma when people who do come forward off the record to assist her risk their jobs and livelihoods if she publishes what they have said in her book, “Black Box.” Her family will be put in danger if the book is published. One detective (known as Detective A) who informed her that the police were told not to arrest Yamaguchi on the order of chief Nakamura, the head of the Tokyo police, can never testify or be quoted by name.
Parliamentary records are ignored, or the stenographer told to not record what is being said if it relates to Ms. Ito’s case. The press refuses to cover the story – what would otherwise amount to a major scandal. Mr. Kanehira of the TBS Network newsroom (who refuses to be filmed) apologizes for his junior colleague, Hamaguchi, and notes how quiet the press has been. The corridors of power form a maze Ms. Ito is trapped within and even the truth as a beacon is unable to guide her through.
Her apartment is wiretapped. Her physical safety isn’t guaranteed. Ms. Ito has been a prisoner in her own city, unable to go outside without someone accompanying her. As time passes, she speaks of forgetting what the cherry blossoms look like.
In 2017, she is told that her criminal case will not be re-opened despite the proof gathered by Ms. Ito and her team of fellow journalists. The Prosecution Review Board denies all requests and Ikaru Yamaguchi threatens legal action against anyone reporting or writing on him suggesting he is a criminal. “Bring it on,” says one of Ms. Ito’s colleagues.
“Rape is murder of the soul,” Ms. Ito writes. She is also afraid enough to write in her will that that she is not suicidal and if she dies during her trial and the investigation, she wants people to take note. Later, she does find herself on the edge and destroyed by the constant stonewalling, harassment, and victim blaming she ends up in the hospital. How many other young women have been through the same thing?
“Journalism is about monitoring power,” she pronounces during a conference of women journalists and academics. Many come forward speaking of their experiences. For the first time she is speaking in public to an audience who embrace and uplift her. They wholeheartedly believe her, and because of her feel enabled to add their voices. Ms. Ito’s stance is one they wish they’d taken. She stands as the face of a movement. The relief she feels at being vindicated by other women and having people to share her shame and horror is palpable and she cries.
“Every time I speak, I feel like I am standing naked. But today I feel like I am being covered in blankets.” Ito’s tears are shared, and her burden shouldered by other women making it easier to carry on. Japan is facing its own ‘Me too’ moment.
Shiori Ito has limited legal recourse against Yamaguchi because there will never be criminal charges filed; however, she takes the case to civil court in 2018. Along with her book and her tireless self-advocacy she has spent most of her twenties reliving the worst night of her life. She tried to deal with her case as a journalist, in the third person, but it is impossible for her to keep the barrier between ‘objectivity’ and the fact she is the human being who was drugged and violated.
Shiori Ito’s documentary is an astounding record of tenacity and bravery in the face of systemic misogyny. One doesn’t have to imagine the professional, personal, and emotional cost of bringing to light the crime she endured. Almost every step she has taken has been filmed. Her personal video diaries, her phone calls, the interviews, the progress of the civil trial, the emails she received – they each form a mountain of evidence not only against Yamaguchi but against Japan. “The black box is a social problem,” Ito says. The black box is where the evidence of sex crimes go when they have been deemed too difficult (read: too challenging) for the authorities to pursue.
Shiori Ito is emblematic of too many Japanese women. In the film, the audience is shown home videos of Shiori as a child pretending to read the news. All she ever wanted to be was a journalist. In one night, over what she had assumed would be a professional meeting, the bright-eyed child was murdered and was replaced by a woman who, bruised and bleeding, became a statistic in Japan’s shameful neglect of victims of sexual assault. She also became an icon of resistance. A woman whose case was mentioned in parliament. A woman who put herself in the direct firing line of every colluding bureaucracy and spoke not only for herself but for the women who could not. Ito’s work is a national testament opening the doors for other people to stand up and fight.
“I’m still here,” Ito says. After eight years of battling for herself and others she has retained her integrity. Panic, intimidation, dark nights of the soul, public and personal shaming, and countersuits were all weathered, and her civil case was successful. Yamaguchi is proclaimed guilty, but he will never be imprisoned. Shiori Ito, in the end, wasn’t fighting to put Yamaguchi in jail but rather to get herself out of the prison that victims of sexual assault are forced into.
Presented with veracity and straddling the line between objectivity and intimacy, every fact Shiori Ito brings to light is a wrecking ball pounding at the walls obstructing justice for women in Japan. Vital and remarkable, Black Box Diaries is a towering feat in documentary filmmaking.
