She embodied Japan’s #MeToo, but with a searing documentary, she is ready to move on

FUKUOKA, Japan – If there is one question Shiori Ito hates, it is: “What’s next for you?”

The 35-year-old is a journalist who became the face of #MeToo in Japan when she went public with rape allegations against a well-known television correspondent after an encounter in a Tokyo hotel room nine years ago. She later won a lawsuit against him.

Now, as she prepares for the American and British theatrical release of Black Box Diaries, a bracing documentary she directed about her experiences battling Japan’s patriarchal justice system, she is tiring of questions about how she plans to continue the fight against sexual violence.

“Are you going to be a politician? What are you going to do about it?” audiences – and journalists – frequently ask her after seeing the film.

“I want to scream back, ‘What are you going to do about it?’” she said. “‘You watched it. Now, it’s with you, you take it, it’s not me. I did everything I can do from my side. Don’t ask me any more.’”

It is the kind of defiance, unorthodox for a woman in Japan, that has made Ito – whose film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January and opens exclusively at The Projector on Nov 7 – a feminist hero in some circles and a punching bag in others.

Ito spoke during more than two hours of conversation over dinner in Fukuoka in southern Japan, where she made a brief stop in October between film festivals in Busan and Zurich.

She described her emotional journey from despair at being betrayed by the police, prosecutors and the Japanese media to triumph when she performed a karaoke version of the 1978 song I Will Survive after the Sundance screening.

“I felt such a big release,” Ito recalled. “I was like, ‘This is it!’, and we shared it.”

By the end of 2024, Black Box Diaries will have been screened at more than 50 film festivals and released in theatres in countries including Belgium, Canada, the Netherlands and Thailand. One notable exception: Japan.

Ito and her producers suspect that Japanese distributors are leery of screening a film about such a controversial case. The man she accused of attacking her, Noriyuki Yamaguchi, was an influential former Washington bureau chief of the Tokyo Broadcasting System and a biographer of former prime minister Shinzo Abe, who was assassinated in 2022.

Black Box Diaries follows the police investigation in Ito’s case and shows how prosecutors ultimately dropped it, saying there was not enough evidence.

At first, Ito recorded all her encounters with the police and prosecutors to protect herself. But after the criminal case was dropped, she decided to go public with her allegations in a news conference in 2017, overriding pleas from her family to remain silent.

The night before she went in front of reporters, she recorded a video diary entry on her iPhone, which opens the film.

Critics on social media and in right-wing publications swiftly attacked Ito, accusing her of wearing a too-revealing outfit – because she left one button undone on a blue-collared blouse – during the news conference.

It was another small sign of Ito’s rebellion: Other Japanese journalists had advised her to dress in the kind of conservative black suit that job applicants wear to interviews. “I said a strong ‘no’ to having a uniform on me,” she said.

Some of the criticism was much harsher, and Ito fled to London at the invitation of Hanna Aqvilin, a Swedish television journalist who had heard about her case. Ito spent a couple of months sleeping under an Ikea desk in Aqvilin’s apartment as the pair began to discuss a documentary project.

When Ito returned to Japan to begin compiling evidence for a lawsuit and to write a book, Aqvilin accompanied her and stayed in her apartment for nine months, in part because Ito was scared of retribution by the police or political actors.

Together, they began filming most of Ito’s activities. With Aqvilin often behind the camera, Ito would address her in English, which partly explains the documentary’s bilingual dialogue.

But even when filming herself, Ito said she often found it easier to express herself in English. In Japanese, “I never felt like I had a language to be angry or be emotional as a woman”, she said.

Aqvilin kept the camera rolling to capture as much as possible. Ito “never told me a single time, ‘Turn off the camera’ or ‘I don’t want this to be filmed’”, Aqvilin said.

Ema Ryan Yamazaki, a documentary film-maker who edited Black Box Diaries, waded through more than 400 hours of footage covering five years, sometimes discovering content that Ito did not remember, including a tormented suicide note to her parents that she had recorded on her iPhone. An unvarnished clip of that video appears in the film.

In another scene that Ito did not recollect until Yamazaki asked her about it during editing, Ito calls a police detective to inform him that she will be using in her book some of the background information he has given her, including that the police had been poised to arrest Yamaguchi at the airport when a superior called off the operation.

As Ito speaks to the investigator on the phone, he seems to confess romantic affection for her.

Yamazaki said she worried about putting the scene in the film because viewers might doubt the investigator’s testimony, given his feelings for Ito. But Ito ultimately was determined to show how women frequently have to navigate men’s emotions and urges. “This is part of many women’s lives,” she said. “I feel like even if you trust someone, this can happen.”

She considered constructing a more traditional documentary with interviews of family members or legal advisers. She even briefly mulled trying to land an on-camera interview with her attacker. She experimented with stop-motion video, using a blow-up doll similar to the one the police had forced her to use to demonstrate what had happened during her assault.

In the end, she simply leaned into the richness of the real-time recordings.

“It was really important for me to share what was happening at the time, not what I’m thinking today,” Ito said. “I believe I remember what I was feeling at the time, but I don’t know, I have changed a lot too.” NYTIMES