Shiori Ito’s Black Box Diaries may have lost to No Other Land at the Oscars, but both the filmmaker and her film have long been making waves in Japan.
Black Box Diaries, nominated for best documentary feature at the 97th Academy Awards, follows Ito's investigation into the sexual violence she suffered herself.
The story begins in 2015 when she meets the Washington DC bureau chief of the Tokyo Broadcasting System, Noriyuki Yamaguchi, to discuss a potential job. She is 25 at the time and an intern at Thomson Reuters.
In the film, Ito remembers meeting Yamaguchi for dinner, losing consciousness during the meal and waking up to Yamaguchi allegedly raping her in his hotel.
Ito says she reported the alleged crime, but police sought to discourage her from filing a report, even making her go through a harrowing recreation of the assault.
“I had to lay down on the floor, there were three or four male investigators with cameras, and they placed this lifelike doll on me and moved it and took photos,” she says.
An arrest warrant was issued in Ito’s case but Yamaguchi, who was allegedly close to then prime minister Shinzo Abe and had written a biography of him, was never arrested and the criminal case was quickly dropped with no explanation.
Ito went public with her allegation in May 2017, but faced backlash in a country where talking about sexual violence is still a taboo. Ito received the kind of criticism that nearly all sexual assault survivors face, including questions about what she was wearing.
She was accused of wearing an outfit that was too revealing because she had left a button undone on a blue, collared blouse that she wore to the meeting instead of the traditional black suit one usually wore to interviews.
In 2019, Ito won a civil trial in Tokyo where judges ruled that Yamaguchi “had sexual intercourse without consent with Ms Ito, who was in a state of intoxication and unconscious”. Ito won damages worth ¥3.3m (£17,387) and immediately became the face of the #MeToo movement in Japan.
Yamaguchi, then 53, denied the accusations and filed a countersuit, claiming the incident was consensual and that Ito’s accusations had ruined his reputation. His suit, seeking ¥130m (£685,360) in damages, was dismissed.
“Honestly, I still don’t know how I feel. However, winning this case doesn’t mean this didn’t happen,” Ito told reporters outside the court in 2019. “This is not the end.”
Ito wrote a memoir about her experience, Black Box, which formed the basis for her directorial debut.
“It took me four years because emotionally I was struggling,” she told the BBC about making the film.
Black Box Diaries premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival and went on to be screened at over 50 film festivals, winning multiple awards along the way and garnering a best documentary nomination at the Oscars, a first in that category by a Japanese director.
In her native country, where a 2017 government survey reported nearly one in 13 (7.8 per cent) women saying they had been raped, Ito’s film might never find an audience.
“We have been struggling to bring the film to Japan, and we hoped the nomination can get us through,” Ito told Deadline earlier in February.
Ito has drawn condemnation from her former lawyers for using what they call unauthorised footage. Ito, however, claims that using it was essential to tell the story of how her case was covered up, even while apologising to those whose “consent for the use of footage was overlooked”.
Her lawyers have said using security footage from the hotel where the incident took place as well as images and audio recordings from a taxi driver and investigators in the case were all meant to be used in court alone and violated the privacy of the people concerned.
Ito responded that she would re-edit the film to ensure “appropriate processing to prevent individuals from being identified” in the aforementioned footage and audio.
The presence of this footage has become a sticking point in getting her film released in the country, though conservative attitudes towards sex and sexual violence have a role to play.
The contentious hotel footage from the night in question, which Ito has said was incredibly hard for her to obtain, allegedly shows Yamaguchi pulling out an inebriated and visibly struggling Ito from a taxi and helping her into the hotel.
“People in general and theatres in this case are more risk averse in Japan than, for example, the States. And they feel more vulnerable to legal claims and trouble,” Black Box Diaries producer Eric Nyari says.
Ito simply maintains: “Distributors, they know it’s no legal issue, so they’re more scared about the public voice.”
Black Box Diaries may never be screened in Japan, but Ito’s case has already led to changes within the country.
In 2023, Japan passed landmark laws that raised the age of sexual consent from 13 to 16 and redefined the definition of rape from “forcible sexual intercourse” to “nonconsensual sexual intercourse” and extended protection to victims under the influence of alcohol or drugs or those coerced by an individual in a position of authority.
Ito describes the film as her “love letter to Japan” and hopes that it has some impact.
“I want to encourage other survivors to tell their story in their own language, because it’s very empowering,” she told the Global Investigative Journalism Network. “Own your story and be the one to tell your own story.”
