The “black box” in the title of Shiori Itō’s documentary Black Box Diaries, in which the journalist investigates her own sexual assault, essentially refers to the excuse Japan gives for not properly investigating rape cases. “Because it’s in a black box, we’ll never really know what happened,” is what Itō was told, and as she says in the film, “I think that tells everything about our justice system.” But the black box works as a loose metaphor for another kind of unknowability that permeates the documentary, which was recently nominated for an Academy Award and is made up largely of personal video diaries, sound recordings, and fly-on-the-wall footage of the filmmaker as she investigates her case and ultimately writes a memoir about it (Black Box, 2017). Itō explains a few times that her way of surviving is to wrap herself up in work, to treat her case as a journalist would. But in the midst of this singular focus, the filmmaker in a sense puts herself—that is, Itō the survivor—in a black box. In the midst of this grand investigation, she herself remains unexamined. “I realized I haven’t faced myself,” she says at one point. The tension between the two sides of her—Itō the journalist and Itō the survivor—makes Black Box Diaries a kind of stealth dual narrative, one in which it becomes clear that a guilty verdict is not the end, not even close.
The film starts with a trigger warning, and I will defer to it here. Itō’s documentary opens with cherry blossom petals floating along the water beneath a script warning of the content and offering up how she has dealt with triggers in the past: by closing her eyes, by taking a deep breath. The flowers seem like just a pretty aesthetic choice at first, but by the end of the film you learn that these petals themselves became a trigger for Itō, and only later did she realize it was because the crime took place during cherry blossom season.
Black Box Diaries teases Itō’s fracturing from the first scene. Itō thinks her case has been ignored and wants to reveal the truth, while a phone call from her sister has her family asking her not to identify herself because “people will see you as a victim.” As one journalist says when Itō faces the press for the first time: “It’s unusual to show your face in a rape allegation." A call with the police then immediately illustrates why this is so undesirable—sexual assault survivors are wrung out for every drop of information, before inevitably being told it is not enough.
What makes Itō’s case so ideal for exposing Japan’s treatment of sexual assault is that it is about as open-and-shut as a case like this can be. Because the accused, Noriyuki Yamaguchi, took Itō back to his hotel, despite Itō repeatedly asking the cab driver to drop her off at a station (“I didn’t know who to listen to,” he told her), footage from the Sheraton Hotel security cameras capture the moments prior to the alleged crime. Itō will later explain in court that she had inquired with Yamaguchi, Washington D.C. bureau chief of the Tokyo Broadcasting System at the time, about a job and was surprised when she showed up to their meeting and found herself at a dinner for two. At the hotel, you see Itō refusing to leave the car then literally being dragged out by Yamaguchi as a doorman watches them, clearly knowing something is wrong. Then through the hotel lobby, Yamaguchi is seen almost marching Itō by the collar as she can barely stand up. (The cab driver remembers him saying, “I won’t do anything, I just want to talk.”) Of course, there is no footage from the hotel room where they end up, but a crying Itō at one point explains to investigators that she woke up in the middle of the assault, and isn't all of that evidence—lobby footage, witnesses, testimony—enough? What about the DNA on her bra? (“That just shows he touched it.”) You get the impression that even if there were footage of the actual incident, the police would still find a way to discredit it. “I don’t understand,” Itō says in tears.
And this is when Itō divides herself in two. Two years after the incident and multiple failed attempts to get the cops to do their jobs, Itō gathers the reams of transcripts from secret recordings she had been making and decides to work the case instead of be it. “Work has been my only way to protect myself,” she explains. But to get it reinvestigated, she has to go public. “If I don’t speak out, the law will not change,” she says. Though this happened years before, when Itō first faces the press, she reminds me a lot of Gisèle Pelicot, the French woman who was drugged and raped by her husband and 72 men he invited over to do the same, and who waived her anonymity during their recent trial. “When you’re raped there is shame, and it’s not for us to have shame, it’s for them,” she said. Seven years before her, Itō expressed an almost identical sentiment.
Throughout the film, Itō refuses to behave according to Japanese tradition, which is the point—she’s made it her job to show how the country’s 110-year-old rape law is no longer working, not that it ever was. Itō is called a prostitute for wearing a blouse that is not buttoned right up to the top (“Don’t tell me how to dress,” she says). She also clearly states she thinks someone in power influenced her case—Yamaguchi was close friends with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe—despite no one she interviews being clear about anything except their fear of losing their jobs (in various ways these people repeatedly say they are just taking orders, which obviously has very dark associations). Itō confronts the various pencil pushers who keep this toxic machine going—the man at the government’s Agency for Violence Against Women, who refuses to say there’s a problem with the police making Itō recreate her rape with a life-sized doll (and despite the shocking statistic that only 4 percent of rapes are reported in Japan); the woman who says they had an arrest warrant for Yamaguchi and then pretends she didn’t just say that; and then there’s Investigator A.
Investigator A is a particularly unsettling part of this documentary for how he toggles between ally and adversary. It takes forever for Itō to convince him to look properly into her case, and when he does get a warrant, it is quashed. He keeps in touch, though, giving her inside information, which has her thinking he is on her side. But he steadfastly refuses to come forward publicly to support her. (“I need financial security.”) The most disturbing moment comes during one drunken phone call when he asks her what she wants, and she says that all she wants is what she’s always wanted, which is for him to reveal his identity. He says he will ... if she marries him. Her shock becomes the audience’s shock. The level of betrayal is hard to fathom.
Considering the amount of obstruction Itō faces, when anyone is even slightly on her side it plays as a massive victory. A particularly animated member of parliament, Michiyoshi Yunoki, is shown several times asking for a change to the decrepit rape laws, bringing up Itō’s case in particular, angrily batting down empty excuses, baldly asking if Yamaguchi gets special treatment because of his Abe connection (no response, which is a response). There’s also the older journalist who oversaw Yamaguchi earlier in his career and apologizes for “raising men like him.” Then there’s the Women in Media group that shares their stories with Itō, some of them not far off from hers. In response, a tearful Itō stands before them and says: “When I speak, I always feel like I am standing here naked, but today it feels like I am covered in blankets. It’s the first time I feel this way.”
But the most euphoric moment comes when Itō, out of nowhere, gets an email from the doorman at the hotel that night, who had tried to go to the police but was shut down by his employers. After he sends her details he remembers, she calls to ask him if she can use the information, knowing it will mean his name will come up and that he will be publicly identified. Itō gives a long preamble, almost as though she’s biding her time, staving off the eventual “no,” but then the doorman says very clearly and without caveat: “I want to do everything to help you.”
You understand why here Itō starts crying and can’t stop. Finally, a decent man who is choosing to help her and asking for nothing in return. It shows how completely alone she has felt up until now. Though Itō is often seen with other people in Black Box Diaries, there is a marked absence of family—she hasn’t even told them her book is coming out less than two weeks before its release. She shows us her panic at various moments throughout the film—alone after reading a story online, walking by the Sheraton Hotel—in way that illuminates how trauma is ultimately borne alone. Itō does not spell it out but at one point after she says, “I cannot live the life I have been given,” the screen goes black, and she wakes up in a hospital bed. The specter of this moment hangs over the remainder of the film. Itō wins a civil trial; the verdict is upheld after an appeal. But eight years after the whole thing started, after a brief dance to “I Will Survive,” in the car with her friend, her friend says, “You made it.” And here the music stops, and Itō is once again alone in the frame, looking out the window. And all you can think of is that line from her book that she pushed to the end: “Rape is a murder of the soul.” She has made it, but she will have to keep making it—over and over and over again, until the end.
