When Shiori Ito publicly accused a well-known journalist of raping her in 2017, she was mostly ignored. Instead, hate mail flooded her inbox, much of it shaming her for unbuttoning the top of her blouse at her first press conference. Her family and friends urged her to put the assault behind her and move on.
Instead, she relentlessly pushed the police to investigate her assaulter, Noriyuki Yamaguchi, a biographer of then prime minister Shinzo Abe.
When the case against Yamaguchi was mysteriously dropped, she took him to civil court for damages and won in 2019, a judgment finalised by Japan’s appellate courts in 2022.
All of this is recounted in a disturbing new documentary, Black Box Diaries, directed by Ito. The film is the first by a Japanese documentary maker to be nominated for an Academy Award, and has been shortlisted for a Bafta. Yet, remarkably, it may never be widely screened in Japan.
Japanese lawyers have criticised the documentary for its use of surveillance footage and secretly recorded audio and video recordings. In one scene, culled from footage outside the luxury Sheraton Miyako Hotel in Tokyo, Yamaguchi is seen tugging the incapacitated Ito from a taxi and dragging her across the hotel floor, strongly supporting her case that she was a victim of non-consensual sex.
Ito secretly records a sympathetic cop insisting she find evidence of the rape and a taxi driver recalling her groggy pleas on the way to the hotel to be dropped off at the train station, overruled by Yamaguchi. Ito has always said she was drugged after she met Yamaguchi at a sushi restaurant to discuss an internship. She awoke several hours later to find him on top of her.
Such recordings are illegal in Japan, said Ito’s former attorney, Yoko Nishihiro. She says the hotel provided the footage for her civil court case (at a cost of 400,000 yen − about €2,500) on the condition it would not be used elsewhere. “The use of unauthorised images and sounds is legally and ethically problematic,” Nishihiro said.
But Ito and her American producer, Eric Nyari, say that misses the point. “There is a strong public interest in showing a young rape victim being treated this way,” Nyari says.
Footage of Ito walking steadily out of the hotel the morning after her assault and provided to Yamaguchi’s defence team was leaked on social media, apparently in an attempt to smear her. That footage remains available online. Ito has been the target of relentless trolling, accusing her of being a prostitute or setting a honey trap for Yamaguchi.
The movie is a wrenching watch. The diary format highlights Ito’s stark suffering as she navigates the aftermath of her assault. She records herself repeatedly agonising over her decision to fight and the impact on her close family, who urge her to stop. A brief scene shot in a hospital shows her recovering from a suicide attempt.
The odds against rape victims are exceptionally high. Very few victims even report their assault in Japan. Even in those rare cases, prosecutors will try to broker a financial deal with victims rather than risk airing their testimony in court. Courts rarely find rapists guilty. The year Ito was assaulted, Tokyo High Court acquitted a man of attacking a 15-year-old girl because it said she had not fought hard enough.
The whiff of political conspiracy hanging over the case adds an extra layer of danger to Ito’s pursuit of justice. Yamaguchi was the author of two books about Abe; the men were reportedly close.
A scene shows Itaru Nakamura, then head of criminal investigations in the Tokyo Metropolitan Police who abruptly cancelled the investigation into the case, fleeing from Ito’s camera. Nakamura, a former aide to Abe’s successor, Yoshihide Suga, went on to become head of the National Police Agency.
Was Yamaguchi protected from prosecution because of his political connections? Nakamura has denied it.
Yet, as documentary maker Atsushi Funahashi notes, there is a dual public interest at stake in Black Box Diaries: as a documentary of profound societal relevance, and as a record of what happened.
“This is a work that addresses fundamental issues within Japanese society, shedding light on the injustices that persist in our systems and culture. It must be seen, discussed, and acted upon.”
