I first saw Shiori Ito’s documentary, Black Box Diaries, about her struggle to bring the man who raped her to some kind of justice, in Oct. 2024 at the Busan International Film Festival. At the opening night reception, the American producer of the film, Eric Nyari, introduced me to Ito, who seemed to be on top of the world. Her movie had premiered at Sundance earlier in the year and had already played several film festivals. At BIFF she exuded the attitude of a total winner. During the opening ceremony, she literally danced down the red carpet, whooping it up along the way. This behavior contrasted starkly with the tone of Black Box Diaries, which is overcast with frustration and, at times, acute depression due to the obstacles Ito faced in trying to get others, in particular the Japanese authorities, to take her accusations against her rapist seriously. It’s only through sheer tenacity that she gets anyone to listen to her because in Japan (and many other places in the world, I imagine) it’s just not considered polite to talk about these matters in public. Consequently, the cognitive dissonance I experienced upon encountering her in person was strong, and immediately I checked myself, because Shiori Ito is many things and “victim” is one that she would probably prefer to minimize. But over the past year, as her movie has failed to find distribution in her native Japan despite already being nominated for an Academy Award and winning a Peabody, it seemed obvious to me that many people in Japan think she should follow the decorum appropriate for a victim, or worse.

The image she has been most keen to project is that of a journalist, which she is, at least in terms of professional aspiration. It’s been this image that has proved most contentious among a certain group of critics in Japan who accuse her of sidestepping journalistic ethics in order to achieve the agenda attempted by the documentary. This criticism has been one of the main stumbling blocks that’s prevented the movie from being shown in Japan. During the press conference at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan on Dec. 15, where the newly edited version of Black Box Diaries was shown to the press, Nyari mentioned that after Sundance foreign distribution came fairly easily, but he knew Japan might be more of a problem because of distributors’ “fear of authorities,” since, in the movie, Ito suggests that the arrest of her rapist was quashed by “higher-ups.” The accused rapist, veteran reporter Noriyuki Yamaguchi, wrote an authorized biography of late Prime Minister Shinzo Abe that was about to be published when the arrest was initially supposed to take place. However, when Ito’s lawyer, Yoko Nishihiro, said that Ito had not properly sought permission from several sources in the documentary and used CCTV footage from the hotel the night of her rape without the hotel’s authorization, the original release date was postponed indefinitely. As condemnation of Ito’s methods rose the release went into limbo.

That is, until last Friday, when Black Box Diaries finally opened at one theater in Tokyo. Nyari said that they hoped more Japanese theaters would pick it up after seeing how popular it was in Tokyo (as of Monday it appears to have sold out every screening so far). The Japan version is different from the original version shown overseas and the one I saw in Busan. Just before the screening the FCCJ distributed a 14-page, single-spaced explanation in both English and Japanese covering in detail all the changes that were made as well as a more complete explication of what Ito believes the film does and what it doesn’t. (The explanation is available on Ito’s website.) Though she still insists it is primarily a work of reporting, she no longer leans on her identity as a journalist to sell its viability, but rather sees the movie as “a documentary in which I—someone directly affected—have taken responsibility for my own story and rewoven it.” It’s an important distinction and one that she has stressed in the face of people who find the movie journalistically irresponsible, a few of whom were at the press conference.

It’s been more than a year since I saw the original version of Black Box Diaries, and watching the new Japan-ready version I didn’t note anything particularly different, except that her interview with the taxi driver who took her and Yamaguchi to the Miyako Hotel on the night of the rape seemed shorter (Nyari said something to this effect at one point). According to Ito’s explanation she has “received permission for use [of the taxi driver footage] in the new version.” The most debated usage in the film has always been that of the CCTV hotel footage, and according to the explanation, CG has been used in the new version to recreate much of this footage. Since it looks exactly as I remember seeing it originally, I’m not sure what kind of practical meaning this change has in the scheme of things—the hotel allowed the real footage to be used only in court proceedings—but, as Ito points out, its inclusion in the film “was indispensable…[for] raising critical questions about the realities of sexual violence,” since it shows clearly Yamaguchi actually dragging an almost unconscious Ito through the lobby, presumably to the hotel room he had reserved. 

One Japanese reporter who works for an online news program asked a heated question about why Ito revealed the identity of “Investigator A,” the Tokyo police detective who had originally handled the rape allegations but was taken off the case after he started taking the assignment seriously. Ito includes a number of conversations with the investigator, both before and after he was transferred off her case—at one point he admits he’s drunk and hits her up for a dinner date—and she says pointedly in the explanation that she never mentions his name and has electronically altered his voice, but the Japanese reporter was vehement in his accusation because the investigator’s “colleagues will know his identity.” Ito didn’t have an answer that would satisfy the reporter. Moderator Jake Adelstein, of Tokyo Vice fame, said that a weekly magazine also quoted the anonymous investigator, so why should they be given a pass and not Ito?

This kind of contention came to a head after Ito mentioned a Tokyo Shimbun reporter who didn’t “fact check” her article after accusing Ito of betraying a group of rape survivors at a seminar. This reporter, Isoko Mochizuki, one of Japan’s most celebrated journalists, who has had two movies made about her, was at the press conference and after Adelstein gave her an opportunity for rebuttal, tore into Ito, mainly for ignoring her former lawyer’s concerns about the ethics of the movie, an accusation Ito was equally exercised at refuting, saying she had requested Nishihiro to watch the revised version, “but all such requests were declined.” Adelstein eventually broke up the fight saying, essentially, that they should take it outside afterwards.

According to reports by Ito and her producers, so far the Japanese screenings have been entirely positive, with viewers coming away greatly moved by Ito’s story, but obviously there are still a lot of people who seem predisposed to not trust the film due to Ito’s supposed journalistic transgressions. Nishihiro has said publicly that the revisions amount to nothing, thus suggesting that she did eventually see it. Only two hours after the FCCJ p.c., Mochizuki was on her video site railing against Ito and Adelstein, whom she denigrated as a terrible host. If these and other critics have a point, it seems mainly based on very strict rules about what makes a journalist a journalist. The Japanese-American documentary director Miki Dezaki, who made the film Shusenjo, about the World War II sex slaves who were pressed into service as prostitutes for Japanese soldiers, went on social media last weekend to say that these critics miss the point; that documentaries are not journalism, which, according to him is supposed to consider all sides of an issue. (I would argue that journalism is mainly engaged in revealing the truth and thus doesn’t necessarily need to show both sides.) Documentaries present the viewpoint of the filmmaker only and should be received as such, but in Japan, most people think of NHK when they think of documentaries, and NHK is notoriously doctrinnaire when it comes to not making itself appear to support a position. 

To Ito’s critics, the worth of a journalist is measured by their adherence to established standards of conduct. Edifying the public is a secondary consideration. The chief standard that Ito supposedly violated was exposing or revealing a source that wishes to remain anonymous, which is certainly a serious charge, but neither the Miyako Hotel nor Investigator A is anything approaching a whistleblower. The Miyako allowed its CCTV footage to be shown in court but reportedly not in the movie, a distinction that makes no sense given that the usage of the footage in court was to help establish that a crime was committed. The case was a civil one because Tokyo police never arrested Yamaguchi even though they supposedly had a warrant. But judges in several courts found in Ito’s favor, implying that a crime had been committed. In that regard, the release of the CCTV footage is very much in the public interest, and regardless of what the Miyako thinks, Ito did what any investigative journalist would do. She made the footage public, albeit in the revised version with the help of CG. The same goes for Investigator A. He told Ito that he believed “higher-ups” halted the arrest of Yamaguchi and took him off the case, which, if true, means the Tokyo police are guilty of dereliction of duty. I don’t know if that’s a crime in Japan, but it’s certainly worthy of public disclosure and thus it is Ito’s duty to include that information. If the investigator gets punished somehow for having revealed this to her, it’s on him because by not standing up to his superiors in the matter he is complicit in the coverup. As for the taxi driver and the Miyako doorman, whose phone conversation with Ito is the most affecting scene in the movie, they apparently gave permission for use of their comments. 

But the problem goes deeper, and has something to do with that image I mentioned earlier. Black Box Diaries is an emotional document; it’s mainly about how Shiori Ito’s rape consumed her soul. In her written explanation she has come around to this justification, steering herself away from the journalistic mission she claimed when the movie was being made. She was in her early 20s when she sought out Yamaguchi as a mentor, hoping he could help her achieve her dream of becoming a career journalist. Whatever one might say about how naive she was, Black Box Diaries became her trial by fire—her first assignment as a reporter, and one that, because it was about her, became an obsession rather than a story to be covered. It can’t be judged purely as journalism, and it was clear from the reaction of non-Japanese journalists at the FCCJ that they see the film as more of an activist statement. What’s distressing about Ito’s critics, the most prominent of whom are women, is that they are willing to sidestep what Black Box Diaries says about sexual violence in Japan in order to score points about professional ethics. Nishihiro even goes so far as to say that Ito violated her sources’ “human rights,” a statement that only goes to show how misused that term is in Japan. Fundamentally, these critics are reacting not against Ito the journalist, but against Ito the person who demands that her anger and pain be acknowledged. What makes them uncomfortable is Ito’s ego, what they see as self-styled martyrdom. Whatever else you want to say about Shiori Ito, she doesn’t hide anything. She’s fierce about her beef with Yamaguchi, a man who still thinks he did nothing wrong, claiming that sex with Ito was consensual, a “misunderstanding,” when everything in the film, regardless of how it got there, points to the opposite. Ito herself admits in her explanation that Black Box Diaries is flawed—she’d never directed a movie before—but its purport, that male sexual violence continues to be tolerated in Japan, can’t be denied.