‘Black Box Diaries’ Review: The Face of Japan’s #MeToo Movement Tells Her Compelling Story

There’s a scene in Shiori Ito’s searing documentary Black Box Diaries, in which the director, who is also the film’s subject, tells a swarm of reporters about trying to press criminal charges against her rapist. Like many sexual violence survivors forced into this ritual of public re-litigation, she is a model of what society has come to expect of courageous women. Her face betrays no emotion and she is dressed in the chaste uniform of the aggrieved: delicate earrings (Ito opts for pearls), a conservatively tailored blouse (a black button down here), and wearing little to no makeup (faint signs of blush and a single stroke of eyeliner).

Ito’s voice remains calm as she recounts the police’s initial refusal to accept her victim’s report and their arsenal of excuses: Sex crimes were difficult to investigate, they said; her rapist, Noriyuki Yamaguchi, the former Washington Bureau chief of the Tokyo Broadcasting System and friend to the late Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe, was too powerful a figure to scrutinize.

After a couple of months, the authorities abandoned Ito’s case and the young woman, a journalist in her own right, decided to go public. She held the aforementioned press conference in May 2017 and published a memoir five months later.

Ito’s actions  — a rare move in Japan, where less than 10 percent of rape victims report their case — sparked a #MeToo moment in the country, forcing the nation to reckon with its attitudes about sexual violence, its perpetrators and its survivors.

Black Box Diaries, which opened Oct. 25 in the U.S., chronicles Ito’s attempts to procure legal redress. With its combination of diaristic iPhone videos, news reports, hotel security footage from the night of Ito’s rape and various audio recordings, the film is a visceral testimony of survival and recourse. 

In its devastation and familiarity, Ito’s debut feature finds company among works that realize the power of survivor testimony.

An obvious one that comes to mind is She Said, Maria Schrader’s conventional dramatization of New York Times reporters Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor’s investigation of Harvey Weinstein. Schrader deployed testimony in a striking way, using the actual recording of Ambra Battilana Gutierrez’s encounter with Weinstein to shift the film’s perspective and jolt viewers out of the comforting lull of fictionalized narratives.

Another is Chanel Miller’s 2019 memoir Know My Name, in which Miller, who was assaulted by Stanford University athlete Brock Turner in 2015, reclaims her identity from the anonymizing moniker Emily Doe. Like Ito, Miller’s narrative finds a galvanizing energy in self-revelation.

A more recent work is director Lee Sunday Evans and actress Elizabeth Marvel’s sobering play The Ford/Hill Project at New York’s Public Theater. That production, which recently ended its run, interpolates the hearings of both Anita Hill, who went before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1991 to testify against then Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, who sexually harassed her, and Christine Blasey Ford, who went before the same committee in 2018 after accusing then Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her in high school.

The material power of the accused — conferred by a society more likely to side with perpetrators than survivors of assault — connects these works, which span different countries and years. Together, these women’s stories form an imposing chorus of damning disclosures, speaking to the difficulty survivors face when trying to tell the truth. 

Most people in Ito’s life begged her not to go public. Conversations with her family and one of the investigators in the aborted criminal case, some of which are included in Black Box Diaries, reveal the depths of fear that nurture a culture of silence in Japan. These people are concerned about losing their jobs, tarnishing their reputations and the threat of violence that might come from Ito subjecting herself to an unsparing public.

Still, the journalist, propelled by the values that drew her to her profession, is compelled to try. Ito approaches her case with the same rigor as she would a news story. This method makes the doc easy to follow for those unfamiliar with contemporary Japanese society while giving Black Box Diaries the propulsive rhythm of, ironically, a procedural.

Many scenes show Ito recording phone calls, taking copious notes and sitting in rooms surrounded by highlighted transcripts and folders of evidence. As director, she uses conversations with her editors, lawyers and friends to give context for why a criminal case was abandoned, a civil suit pursued and the politics within Japanese society that have complicated every step in her journey.

Anecdotes gleaned from clandestine meetings with an anonymous investigator underscore Yamaguchi’s power. In one particularly implicative story, the investigator tells Ito that despite having an arrest warrant for the high-profile journalist, police chief Itaru Nakamura, who counts Yamaguchi as a friend, decided against it. 

The details of Ito’s case, especially for audiences familiar with the narratives of survivors, echo stories that have become more common since the height of the #MeToo movement. The callousness of investigators, the craven police interrogation methods that seek to discount the memory of survivors by insisting the truth hinges on minute details and the vitriol of a misogynistic public are all on display in Black Box Diaries.

Where Ito’s film distinguishes itself is in the diaristic iPhone videos, which serve as a mode of confrontation for the director as subject. In these clear-eyed and visceral confessions, Ito the journalist dissolves and Ito the person comes into better view.

They reveal the chronic isolation of survivors and give space to the private demons that come to the fore when they aren’t required to mask their pain through calibrated outfits and steady intonations. They reclaim the idea of testimony, changing it from a public act to an urgent and healing private one.