Itō Shiori, the Japanese #MeToo trailblazer who regrettably never was
A conspiracy-thriller-adjacent documentary of her 8-year journey as a sexual assault survivor, Itō Shiori’s Black Box Diaries (2024) details the civil case against her assaulter that hinged on a witness in a piece of CCTV footage played twice: a man drags an intoxicated and reluctant Itō out of a taxi at the entrance of Sheraton Miyako Hotel Tokyo, and the hotel porter holds the taxi door and watches the pair stumble into the lobby. That man is alleged to be Yamaguchi Noriyuki, television journalist and biographer of former prime minister Abe Shinzō, formally accused by Itō of rape in 2017 after over two years of investigation. Presented as stone-cold evidence, this footage, along with a video of the taxi driver recollecting his exchange with Itō and Yamaguchi that night and many phone calls between Itō and her case’s original investigator, ironically impeded the film’s release in Japan (and only in Japan) due to its unauthorized use. Two contrasting lines of rhetoric are in play here: one shaped by the documentary, and the other, a reactive deflection of the former that is defeating its own rhetorical purpose.
With her emotional account of a sexual assault victim struggling in both public and private spheres, Itō’s documentary puts forward a feminist rhetoric similar to the #MeToo movement’s: women, as a minority group, are constantly exposed to structural violence so much so that even when one is definitely sexually victimized, individual shame and expected silence remain the only two systemic responses. Many of her recordings and footage substantiate this claim. One of the most memorable is her back and forth with an investigating police officer. Despite the hopeful issue of a warrant for Yamaguchi’s arrest, the former head of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department withdrew the warrant minutes before the apprehension, according to the officer on a phone call with Itō. Later, a voice recording of Itō’s inquiry into the failed arrest at the Tokyo Police Headquarters reveals further ambivalent and even outright conflicting statements from the police: “Although there’s an arrest warrant, it doesn’t mean we can make an arrest…. [When Itō ascertained if they had a warrant] Oh, I didn’t say that.” The last phone call between Itō and the officer, now slightly drunk and perhaps entitled, features an excruciating “joke” from the latter in response to Itō’s continued appeal for him to speak out: “If you marry me, I will.” Itō laughs it off on the spot, but her quick switch to a jaded expression says it all; some men seem to operate with a transactional mindset rather than a moral compass.
The hotel’s surveillance footage and the taxi driver’s and the police officer’s testimonies, however, arguably add the most evidentiary weight to Itō’s rhetoric. As much as Itō moves the audience with her compelling presence and inspiring personality worthy of a righteous journalist, as popular critics put it, the nature of a prototypical documentary demands the inclusion of photographic evidence, or what film and media scholar Carl Plantinga calls “asserted veridical representation.” Plantinga’s notion would be helpful in determining the necessity and effectiveness of showing said footage and testimonies. To achieve such a representation, the documentary’s creator should make the following expectations for the audience discernible: 1) forming an opinion about the propositions asserted by the film, which Itō’s many self-filmed talking-head videos plead, 2) phenomenologically experiencing the allegedly true events as visually and sonically presented in the film, which the public announcement of Itō’s win at her civil lawsuit and the media journalists’ gathering exemplify, and 3) deeming all the images and sounds reliable to assist one’s belief formation. This final characterization, indispensable to a successful expository and/or persuasive documentary, endorses showing the hotel’s footage (said to be the only visual evidence of the assault), the driver’s description of his encounter with Itō and Yamaguchi, and the officer’s comments on the case. Not only do they counter Yamaguchi’s assertion that what happened was consensual, more importantly they expose the dreadful social reality in which the Rashōmon effect, or the her-words-against-his situation, often works in the man’s favor.
Itō is seen mobilizing all available resources to hunt down the powerful perpetrator and simultaneously confronting the aftermath of the assault as well as her coming out against him.
In her recent essay published in Eizōgaku: Japanese Journal of Image Arts and Sciences, Nakane Wakae draws on documentary theoretician Bill Nichols’s concept of “situated ethics” and philosopher Alain Badiou’s “ethic of truth” to debunk the binary thinking embedded in the controversy over the unpermitted footage in Black Box Diaries. Both approaches treat the filmmaker as an ethical agent who takes responsibility in constructing or visibilizing a represented event that contributes to public knowledge and foreground the malleable relationality of ethical conduct and representation. Itō’s first-person narrative is especially potent in presenting her truth beyond her established iconicity in Japanese feminist politics. Working against the public labeling of her as an ashamed victim, Itō is seen mobilizing all available resources to hunt down the powerful perpetrator and simultaneously confronting the aftermath of the assault as well as her coming out against him. However, it is in this specific context that the Japanese opposers categorically disregarded her previously unseen side of truth through naming her non-acquisition of informed consent (for which she recently offered an official statement of apology) as the most unethical conduct in the grand scheme of things.
This rival rhetoric surrounding trust violation and privacy protection deflects the attention to Itō’s petition for justice and sympathy and instead serves symbolically as an act of character assassination. Most of all, it works to quash voices on sexual violence and societal complicity in its being a taboo subject, which indirectly perpetuates such violence. With the film’s limited domestic media exposure and her international success at foreign film festivals and university tours, Itō has been cast as an outsider in her home country, aligning with the dated perception of female victims yet proving her point in the documentary: (wo)men in power would do everything to name and shame those who displease or threaten them. But does this rhetoric really succeed in deflecting what was meant to be bypassed? The silence, marked by the lack of official explanation for the film’s yet-to-be-released status as well as a near-complete eschewal of domestic conversations about the subject, is deafening.
To quote Badiou, “evil is the will to name at any price.”
Heidi Ka-Sin Lee is a film researcher and a lecturer in the Department of English Studies at Sophia University. She earned her PhD in international culture and communication studies from Waseda University. Her research interests include queer cinema, cognitive film theory, character engagement, film music, and intermedial adaptation. She has published articles on lesbian-centered films and series in journals such as Senses of Cinema and USC’s Spectator as well as The Routledge Handbook of Motherhood on Screen.
