Shiori Ito’s film about her own alleged sexual assault has been screened at over 50 film festivals and won multiple awards
Shiori Ito’s Black Box Diaries was nominated for Best Documentary at the recently held 97th Academy awards. The documentary lost to No Other Land but Shiro and her movie are being talked about in Japan.
Black Box Diaries is about the investigation that Shiori Ito herself did after she suffered sexual assault herself.
The documentary begins in the year 2015 when Ito meets the Washington DC bureau chief of the Tokyo Broadcasting System, Noriyuki Yamaguchi, to discuss a job opening. She was 25 at the time and already working as an intern at Thomson Reuters.
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During the film, Ito talks about meeting Yamaguchi for dinner, later she loses consciousness while having the meal and next she wakes waking up to Yamaguchi allegedly raping her in the hotel.
Ito says she did report the alleged sexual crime, but police discouraged her from filing a report.
“I had to lay down on the floor, there were three or four male investigators with cameras, and they placed this lifelike doll on me and moved it and took photos,” she said according to a report in The Independent.
Though an arrest warrant was issued but Yamaguchi, who was allegedly close to then prime minister Shinzo Abe, was not arrested. Infact the criminal charges against him were also dropped.
Two years later in 2017, Ito decided to go public but she faced backlash as talking about sexual violence is still a taboo in Japan.
Ito received a lot of backlash and was also accused of wearing a revealing outfit instead of the regular black suit that one should usually wear to interviews.
But Ito fought the case and in 2019, she won a civil trial in Tokyo where judges said that Yamaguchi indeed 'had sexual intercourse without consent with Ms Ito, who was in a state of intoxication and unconscious.' Ito also became the face of Japan's #MeToo movement.
But Yamaguchi denied all the allegations and even filed a countersuit, seeking ¥130m (£685,360) in damages. But his suit was dismissed. He also said that the sexual act was consensual.
Ito then went on to write a memoir about her experience, Black Box. “It took me four years because emotionally I was struggling,” she told BBC.
Black Box Diaries was first screened at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival and then went on to be shown at over 50 film festivals. It won multiple awards before earning the nomination at Oscars.
Ito also told BBC that more than 400+ hours of footage was edited for the documentary. It also had CCTV footage that showed an intoxicated Ito being pulled from a taxi and taken into a hotel.
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