Sexual assault is sadly the most inclusive crime there is. I don’t know a single person, man or woman, who has not been somehow, whether they know it or not, affected by rape and sexual assault, and the impact of it is often intergenerational.
Nancy Miller (Nancy Miller on “I’ll Be Gone in the Dark”, Michelle McNamara, and the true crime of sexual assault)
We bring back our Sundance 2024 review of Shirori Ito’s “Black Box Diaries” with the upcoming select theater release on Friday, November 1st. In Chicago can see the film at the Siskel Film Center. Learn more.
In 2015, journalist Shiori Ito was drugged at a restaurant and then raped by Noriyuki Yamaguchi, a former Washington Bureau Chief for the Tokyo Broadcasting System, at the Sheraton Hotel in Tokyo. Shiori Ito reported the incident to the police, and because of Yamaguchi’s close friendship with Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, her criminal case was never taken seriously. As a journalist, Shiori Ito knew that documenting her journey would protect her in the long run. After she lost the criminal case, she brought a civil suit against him, and won. This took years through documenting everything she went through with the police, interviewing the people involved in her case, and her back and forth with the Japanese legal system. This collection became her book called Black Box Diaries, that shares the same name as this documentary that she directed.
“Black Box Diaries” moved me like so many other films that deal with these topics. I always love when the documentarian puts their own voice into a film, and in this case, the documentarian’s voice is the story. Everything works together: Shiori’s video diaries, her shots of Tokyo’s fleeting city, and the truth that underlies what we see. The film is a triumph, and will speak to so many on a deeper level, because Shiori’s words hold so much power. Her words become the pulse of this film. In fact the film starts with her handwriting on the screen over a bubbling brook with petals of cherry blossoms cascading through the water:
I know there are countless numbers of you out there in the world who have experienced sexual violence.
Please be mindful of the triggers in this film.
Close your eyes and take a deep breath if you need to.
That has helped me many times.
Now let me tell you a story.
Tokyo has 40.8 million residents as reported in 2023. It is a city full of people that is constantly in motion. We feel that as Shiori tells her story. There are several scenes with her voice, or the voices she interviewed for this documentary, overlaying cityscapes of Tokyo. In one scene, we see millions of feet walking through the streets, followed by shots of skyscrapers. We see these buildings through the windows Shiori peers through, car windows, apartment windows. Being amassed in this claustrophobic world, we feel what Shiori feels. What keeps driving her? Telling the truth.
2017 was the year that Shiori went public with her story to the press. The papers did not give her the exposure she was hoping for, and what did come out was more backlash than support. Shiori shares in her Director Statement, “In Japan, where speaking of rape remains taboo, only 4% of victims report their cases to police.” For her to come forward was so brave. She came out to the press right about the time of the rise of the #MeToo movement in Hollywood. When Shiori followed #MeToo on her socials, she seemed to have a glimmer of hope, but it would take years before she would have worldwide support.
When she decided on the title of her book, Black Box Diaries, she was so excited by the name, because she knew how perfectly that communicated the problem with Japan’s law enforcement and judicial system when dealing with sexual crimes. In these black boxes, stories get lost, and fall into the darkness. Shiori Ito is driven to not be another one of those lost stories in the hopes that other stories will come to light. When Shiori is having her civil case in the film, there is a woman with the press yelling through a loud-speaker, “Black Boxes is not an individual problem, it’s a societal one.” That term “Black Boxes” became coined after Shiori Ito’s book came out that impacted so many.
There is moment that stays with me when Shiori decides that she is going to interview Itaru Nakamura, the chief of police who dismissed her case, by catching him off guard outside his home. Shiori and her camera people wait in the car by his gate. While they are waiting, they see two little children looking back at them curiously. They all start laughing in the car, exuding the innocence of the children, and it brings down their nerves. When Nakamura drives out of his home, Shiori chases him, and loses him. She makes a joke that she should have had breakfast that morning and worn different shoes. This whole scene just shows the strength she has to pursue truth, but also you see the lightness in her demeanor.
Another beautiful moment is when Shiori speaks to the women in media at Harajuka after her book comes out and before her civil trial against Yamaguchi begins. They pour out to her their empathy, expressing how she is not alone. She breaks into tears and shares how they have made her feel as if they are putting blankets on her, because she has felt so cold in her loneliness in this fight. Her family is not even supportive of her being in the public about her story, so to have these women around her, supporting her, was truly a moving scene.
Shiori admits she started out on her journey dealing with her trauma as a journalist, treating herself as the story, but towards the end of the film, she also admits that “she must figure out how to face my wounds.” Because she admits that she has been facing all of this as a journalist, as a “third-person,” but she must now face herself, and work on her healing.
When Yamaguchi loses the civil case and goes into the press room, he keeps accentuating that he has done nothing illegal, as this was a civil case. An American journalist asks, “Do you have any regrets? Are there are any things that you wish you had done differently?” Yamaguchi says he regrets it because “she” got “PTSD,” and kept referring to the incident of his rape as a “misunderstanding,” and not a crime. Shiroi, at the same time, is in the press room with the Japanese journalists, listening to the translation and she has no reaction on her face, because this is nothing new for her.
After the press conference with Yamaguchi, it follows with her handwriting on a black screen, accompanied by the same same ethereal music that started the film’s journey.
Yamaguchi appealed the verdict. My legal battles continued.
Investigator A stayed with the Tokyo Metropolitan Police.
The doorman kept his job at the Sheraton Hotel.
Nakamura, who halted the arrest, became the head of Japan’s National Police Agency.
Then we are taken to footage of the Prime Minister’s corpse being taken away after he was shot at a campaign rally, that follows with a social media post by Yamaguchi reporting on his death. Then we arrive back to black with her handwriting:
That same day, the Supreme Court upheld my civil court victory.
We end the film with Shiori and her friend being driven through the tunnel that started out the film. She starts playing “I Will Survive” by Gloria Gaynor. She sings loud with her arm flexing, and seems relieved, yet she can’t help but note, “I was 25 ([at the time of the rape], but now I’m 33!”
Her friend says, “It’s the end of an era.”
Then we stay on Shiori’s face, which shifts from joy to extreme sadness. Shiori Ito knows that she’s not alone, and the more we as women speak up, we can change and evolve the way we think about sexual crimes. It’s just sad that so many women, like Shiori, have to pave the way to make this a reality. As she and her friend were going through the tunnel, I couldn’t help but think of the final scene of “Thelma and Louise,” with the titular pair hand in hand with tears in their eyes as they drive off a cliff. But we must see that all of Shiori Ito’s work as a journalist, documenting every part of her story like other post-#MeToo stories, has started to shift the ways we think about sexual crime as a society.
I will conclude with a quote I use often from Patton Oswalt when talking about the survivors and the victims of the Golden State Killer. His late wife, Michelle McNamara, was also a journalist and author of I’ll Be Gone in the Dark. “The world is angry when they see young beautiful, smart, vivacious women living independently. And there is this compulsion to want to steal that from them.”
Our Sundance 2024 coverage is sponsored by the Gene Siskel Film Center. One of the last arthouse theaters in Chicago, they present a curated collection of international, independent, and classic cinema reflective of Chicago’s diverse community. Learn more.
