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BLACK BOX DIARIES: A Review
by Karen Pecota

Shiori Ito | Japan | USA | United Kingdom | 2024

Japanese director, writer, and journalist Shiori Ito courageously presents in BLACK BOX DIARIES her investigation of her own sexual assault from a high-profile offender. Ito tells her story as if you were watching her detailed personal journal. Her book Black Box gives credence to her experience, but the impact of her film, now public, is the right documentation with the book’s collaboration needed for her case to be re-examined.

In May 2017, against her families wishes, Ito went public about being raped by Noriyuki Yamaguchi, a former Washington Bureau Chief for the Tokyo Broadcasting System, a close ally to then Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. In Japan, where speaking of rape is still taboo, only 4 percent of victims report their cases to police. Ito’s search for answers and justice for her own tragedy is the case in Japan where the country’s outdated judicial and societal systems are exposed and challenged, ultimately forcing a societal change. It’s a wake-up call for past, present, and future generations.

Ito writes on gender-focused human rights issues and never imagined she would be presenting her own case to the world at great personal cost. Necessary was for Ito to share from her deeply personal material in order to give a voice to the victim, as heart-wrenching as it may be, to give weight to the seriousness of the country’s hidden secrets, and to sound the alarm for change. What has come out of her intense personal battle for justice is one of triumph. As a victim and the investigator of her own case, BLACK BOX DIARIES reveals what Ito’s story has done: to create social change and to keep her alive.

Ito explains the title of her film and her book, a “black box” is defined as a system whose internal workings are hidden or not readily understood. “Japan is a land of black boxes, and I learned what happens in this society when you start opening them. Our film is about one woman’s experience—my black box, laid open for all to see.”