You don’t get a full picture of Shiori Ito’s assailant in a literal sense until late in the ”Black Box Diaries,” but while he remains out of view for dramatic effect, it isn’t for the shock of seeing him when he finally comes into focus. The facts of the case are presented early and clearly by Ito, a journalist who was escorted home one evening by her colleague at the time, Noriyuki Yamaguchi, a chief Washington correspondent Tokyo Broadcasting System, who instructed his driver to take them to a hotel rather than her residence when she was rendered largely incapacitated. There are details that may remain slightly out of reach when they’re too hazy too remember or simply too painful for Ito, but she’s located the surveillance video from the hotel and conducted enough interviews to be certain of the particulars that she was raped by Yamaguchi, yet proving it is only half the battle when it isn’t the facts that she’s contending with, but Yamaguchi’s stature in the country, accruing powerful friends in his time covering politics and becoming a close confidant of then Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
Among the many injustices that come to light in “Black Box Diaries,” which covers four years of Ito fighting to get the truth out after the incident in 2015, is the exposure required of a survivor of sexual assault to be heard and seen as credible, which stands in stark contrast to how Yamaguchi could remain in the shadows through the same period of time, feeling little pressure to answer the accusations against him and likely not even needing to engage with police handling the investigation. It’s no wonder that as Ito learns 70% of sexual assault cases go unreported in the country when the system is set up to place such a burden on those who do report and so obscured – to get that tidbit alone, Ito goes to considerable effort to get a government official to go on record. But in making the difficult decision to go public when she knew it could make an impact from her work in journalism, Ito’s chronicle of her own experience, which first took the form of a book of the same title as “Black Box Diaries,” reveals how even if individual perpetrators are convicted in court, they’ve set off an ongoing nightmare for the people they’ve assaulted.
When the aftermath is no considered no less traumatic than the crime, the horrific details of the night in question are less infuriating than what Ito both describes and can be seen enduring in the fallout from the assault, such as when she recalls the indignity of acting it out for the benefit of officers with a life-size doll to an official unaware of such a policy and the various insights yielded from two years of conversations with an investigator who was initially assigned her case, only to be transferred under suspicious circumstances. Ito is careful to tailor the film to survivors, offering a moment to take a breath before the film really gets underway, but it also ends up speaking to all whose silence becomes complicity when the process itself appears fallible and easily corrupted, upheld by even those who have good intentions. The unique vantage point she has extends beyond her compassion for fellow survivors and even being able to rigorously report on what happened to her given her professional skillset as she considers what it means to go public as a member of the media, refusing to heed her parents’ warnings that she’ll only be identified for what’s happened to her than who she is from there on out.
With the film’s fortuitous timing, unfolding before #metoo and after it takes hold in Japan when her book is eventually seen as a clarion call, Ito’s patience is tested when the rewards of putting herself out there have no immediate rewards and the film arrives at an unusually powerful climax when she can go on the street and is asked to have her picture taken by those who have taken up public protests on her behalf while she goes unrecognized by others in the same group when she doesn’t necessarily need to be the face of the movement any longer. Of course being front and center of her own film will result in a lasting association, but in “Black Box Diaries,” she’s truly exposing something else.
“Black Box Diaries” is now playing at Film Forum in New York and opens on November 1st at the Laemmle Royal.