A searing testament to the power of journalism and resilience, Black Box Diaries exposes the systemic failures that silence survivors—and the fight to rewrite the law.
The image burns in the brain.
We are in a cab, hearing audio of the driver’s voice on the night in question. An incapacitated Shiori Ito, 25, repeatedly asks the driver to take her to the train station. Beside her is Noriyuki Yamaguchi—Tokyo Broadcasting world honcho, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s associate and soon-to-be biographer—twice her age, whom she had contacted about a journalism job. He insists that the driver take them instead to his hotel. As the driver’s confusion becomes apparent, Yamaguchi gets more insistent. He won’t do anything, he says. He just wants to talk to her.
In the end, the driver relents.
In silence, we watch grainy footage from the hotel CCTV as Yamaguchi gets out of the cab. When he sees that Ito has not followed him, his body language shows exasperation. He stretches into the cab and grabs her by the arm, dragging her out. Once she is barely upright, he keeps his hold on her as he pulls her forward, teetering on her high heels. We watch as Yamaguchi drags Ito’s body through the hotel lobby, her head bobbing and lolling, her wobbling legs trailing behind her.
If ever there was evidence of a lack of consent from the start in what would become a landmark rape case in Japan, this is it. But consent was irrelevant under Japanese rape law. Besides, Yamaguchi was way too important to be held accountable for what Ito said happened that night in 2015: After drugging her earlier, he raped her as she lay unconscious.
Ito awoke that night to Yamaguchi on top of her and no memory of what had happened before. When she tried to escape, he dragged her back and threw her on the bed—face smashed against the sheets, nipple bleeding, body bruised.
“I thought I was going to die,” she said. Actually, when it was over, all he wanted was to keep her underwear, as a “souvenir.”
Black Box Diaries is an extraordinary, Oscar-nominated and deeply relevant achievement by this first-time documentary filmmaker. As both a rape survivor and journalist, Ito spent five years creating a cinéma vérité record of what it took for her to take on a powerful man like Yamaguchi.
Black Box Diaries builds suspense as events unfold chronologically, using a cinematic potpourri. It includes Shiori Ito’s surreptitiously obtained audio recordings of her being interrogated, denigrated and disbelieved, as well as her inventive, at times disturbingly off-kilter, imagery—from a kitchen floor, under a table in what looks like an interrogation room, outside the partial facades of cold-stone office buildings. These shots reflect the off-kilter patriarchal world she is struggling to capture and call to account.
There are periodic cursive notes from Ito’s diary, cell phone videos she takes of herself speaking both to herself and for posterity, and intimate shots of herself at varied points in her long, at times emotionally devastating, journey to justice. She immerses us in parliamentary proceedings, her meeting with the head of the Tokyo Police Department’s Office of Violence Against Women (a man), and meetings with her lawyers, other journalists and friends.
We also see her at home, in devastating moments when it seems no one who knew what happened would stand up and tell the truth—and, in lighter moments, when she is able to laugh at Ito the journalist as she matter-of-factly orders a bug detector for her house to protect Ito the young survivor.
There has been some recent blowback to Ito’s techniques: She is being challenged for using video and audio of three people, including one of her lawyers, without the permission of the people involved, and the security camera footage without the hotel’s permission. In response, Ito issued a statement apologizing for “causing harm” and said she “was making a modified version of the film ‘to ensure that individuals cannot be identified,’” The New York Times reported. She and her producers are also maintaining their commitment to keeping footage, like the hotel security footage—“the only visual proof of the sexual assault,” said Ito—that they “are not going to change.”
While Black Box Diaries is the first full-length documentary made by a Japanese director ever nominated for an Oscar and scheduled to be shown in over 30 countries, in keeping with a history of resistance to “showing unflattering films,” reported The Times, the film is not being shown in Japan.
We are living through a spectacular array of reports of men delighting in sex with incapacitated women. We recently witnessed the convictions of over 50 men for participating in the rape and sexual assault of Gisèle Pelicot while she was unconscious, the assaults arranged by her husband, who hosted and joined in the rape raves for more than a decade. Not long before that, we heard the astonishing victim statement read in court by then-27-year-old Chanel Miller, who broke her anonymity to own that she was the girl whose body was discovered behind a dumpster, half-naked, unconscious, beneath the body of a young man who was sexually assaulting her.
Before that, there was the cell phone video of the limp, apparently unconscious body of an unnamed 16-year-old girl, grabbed by her wrists and ankles, dangling from the arms of two high school football stars as they cheerily dragged her from house to house to be sexually assaulted on the night of several pre-season parties for Steubenville’s Big Red football team.
For American audiences, Black Box Diaries is a reminder of the worldwide impact of the U.S. #MeToo movement and of all of the places on this planet where no such progress has begun. It is also a visceral and highly original cinematic portrayal of what it took for one determined, creative young journalist—despite the suffering she endured that night and all that came after, including the vitriol—to persevere, to challenge power and to force change. And force it she did.
Besides holding Namaguchi (who described his interaction with her as “a misunderstanding”) accountable, Shiori also influenced something even greater: In 2023, Japan added consent to its rape law.
Black Box Diaries is available to stream on Paramount Plus.
