Rarely has a karaoke session been so meaningful. Shiori Ito had just answered the final question at the audience talk-back following the premiere of the documentary she made about her own sexual assault investigation, when she heard the opening chords of Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” fill the theater. Feeling euphoric after having shown her film to the world at the famed Sundance Film Festival, the Japanese director grabbed the mic and started singing. Audience members joined her onstage, and soon she was surrounded by a swarm of “dancing, crying, screaming” women. “We shared so much emotion,” Ito says of the impromptu karaoke session. “I’d never had that experience before, and I can’t forget it.”
It was a cathartic release, nearly a decade in the making. The story of how Ito got to that stage in Park City, Utah, begins in 2015, when she was a 25-year-old budding video journalist who was nearing the end of an internship at Reuters and seeking new opportunities. On a Friday night in April, Noriyuki Yamaguchi, one of Japan’s most prominent television journalists, then the Washington bureau chief of the Tokyo Broadcasting System (and biographer of then prime minister Shinzo Abe), invited Ito out to a restaurant in Tokyo after she had reached out to inquire about an internship at his network. (She had briefly met him during previous stints working in Washington, D.C.)
The last thing she remembers is feeling lightheaded in the bathroom; the next thing she remembers is waking up around 5 A.M. in pain with Yamaguchi on top of her penetrating her. Five days later, Ito went to the police to file a report alleging that Yamaguchi had taken her to his hotel room and raped her while she was unconscious. But investigators refused to accept her victim report for weeks, saying she had no evidence or memory. Pushing back, as shown in the film, Ito tells the officer on the phone, “When I woke up, I was being raped.” The officer replies, “I was told that’s not enough.”
At the time, laws concerning sexual assault in Japan dated back to 1907, and not giving consent was not enough. To prove a rape occurred, survivors had to show physical force or intimidation was used against them and that they fought back violently. Sexual assaults where there was alcohol involved, or where the victim was unconscious and unable to resist, were considered especially hard to substantiate and prosecute. Yamaguchi repeatedly denied Ito’s claims of rape, saying the intercourse was consensual. Ito was told by one prosecutor that because the assault occurred behind closed doors, it was “a black box.”
But Ito was determined to shed light inside the black box, and urged investigators to look at the hotel’s security cameras. When they did, they saw Yamaguchi pulling her out of the car and propping her up as he led her through the hotel lobby around 11:20 P.M. (In the footage, it appears as though Ito is barely conscious, her head bobbing on Yamaguchi’s shoulder as he holds her upright.) Police also located the taxi driver who brought Yamaguchi and Ito to the hotel; he told police that Ito had tried to get him to drop her at a train station, but Yamaguchi insisted on going to his hotel. He also said Ito passed out during the drive and he found vomit in the back seat. The security footage, the taxi driver’s account, and the fact that Yamaguchi’s DNA was found on Ito’s bra supported her story, but prosecutors didn’t take action.
Feeling defeated but determined, Ito then did something that is almost unheard-of in Japan: She went public. Not only are rape allegations rarely reported there—a 2020 survey by Japan’s Cabinet Office found just 5.6 percent of victims go to the police (by contrast, about one-third of sexual assaults in the U.S. are reported to authorities)—when they do report, it is common for survivors to hide their faces and anonymize their names. Which is why it was revolutionary when, on May 29, 2017, Ito held a press conference near the Tokyo District Court, showing her face and using her real name as she urged prosecutors to reopen the investigation. “The typical expectation of a victim—to be sad and weak, to hide and be embarrassed—I had a problem with this norm,” she said as a flurry of cameras clicked in front of her. “I have nothing to hide. If I don’t speak now, the law will not change. That’s why I’m coming forward.”
Ito grew up in Kawasaki, a large city just south of Tokyo, the eldest of three. Like many young women growing up in Japan, she was exposed to sexual assault early in life. “When you are in high school using public transportation almost every day, you are a target for groping,” Ito says. “I’ve been groped. It’s often on the most crowded train. Before class, we would share what happened that morning. Someone jerked off on your skirt; someone touched someone. It was so normalized.”
“But I never went to the police,” Ito adds, “because I heard my girlfriends say they wouldn’t listen to me. You have to tell them everything, but nothing happens, and you miss a day of school. What’s the point?” The experience of reporting itself can often be traumatizing. At one point during her rape investigation, Ito alleges police had her reenact the assault using a life-size doll while they took photos.
In the aftermath of her assault, she was angry about all that had been taken from her as she was building her career. At first, she felt like maybe she should pretend she was okay—toughen up, accept it, move on. Perhaps this was what is required of women in this industry, she wondered. “Sometimes you just have to survive,” she tells me. But then she thought of her little sister, nine years her junior. The point, she realized, of reporting, of fighting for justice, for change, is for those who come behind.
The morning after she was assaulted, Ito had plans to have brunch with her sister. They planned to meet at a new Hawaiian café, because her sister wanted to try their pancakes. Sitting across from her sister at the table, she thought about how her sister was more introverted than she was; she feared if something like this happened to her, she’d never tell her. “When I saw her, I felt I couldn’t forgive myself if the same thing happened to her,” Ito says. “I would blame myself if I didn’t do everything I could to change the law.”
Speaking out publicly had its consequences. After her press conference, she was called a “prostitute” online because she had had the top button of her collared shirt unbuttoned while she was sharing her story. But there were glimmers of hope, too. In June 2017, the Japanese government revised its sexual assault statutes for the first time in 110 years. For the first time, men, too, could be victims (previously the legal definition of rape was such that men could only be perpetrators); the minimum sentence for rape was also increased from three years to five.
On Sept. 22, 2017, prosecutors announced they had decided not to pursue a criminal case. Still undeterred, Ito filed a civil suit, suing Yamaguchi for about $100,000. (He countersued for defamation, for more than $1 million.) The following month, Ito published a book titled Black Box. Originally published in Japanese, the book has since been translated into nine other languages.
Ito didn’t set out to make a documentary, but she had been recording all along. Walking around Tokyo, she had started to feel as though she had been branded “the woman who was raped.” She would see vans with tinted windows outside her apartment and fear for her safety. Partly to protect herself and partly to hold the police accountable, beginning in 2015, Ito picked up her camera phone. She began recording her conversations with investigators, both phone calls and in-person meetings, slipping a recorder in her bra when necessary. She also spoke directly to the camera, recounting what was happening and how she was feeling in real time.
As part of an exchange program in high school, Ito had studied in Kansas for a year, and she is fluent in English. She spoke English in her video diaries, because she says she isn’t good at expressing herself in Japanese. “In Japanese, we have a certain way we’re supposed to speak as women—it’s not okay to show anger, it’s not okay to be emotional. You have to be super polite to older men,” she explains. “So for me, when I decided to face this whole thing, I couldn’t think with my mother tongue. It was so taboo—I didn’t have the language to use. English gave me a tool to speak, to express myself, to be angry.”
After two years of recording herself, and a few weeks after the press conference, Ito received a Skype call from Hanna Aqvilin, a Swedish video journalist living in London. Aqvilin invited her to come stay, and eager for a break from Japan, Ito accepted. Neither of the women had made a feature-length documentary before, but by the end of Ito’s time in London, they decided to try, with Aqvilin serving as producer and Ito as director. Aqvilin came to Japan to film with Ito; when it was time to edit, they had some 400 hours of footage to work through.
In a 2021 essay from Black Box for Literary Hub, Ito wrote that after her press conference, whenever she saw “Shiori Ito” in the media, it felt like she was watching “someone I didn’t know.” Taking the unconventional step of directing a film about her own assault was a way of facing the trauma she had experienced and the resulting emotions head-on. “I realized I’d been running away from a core part of myself and how I was really feeling,” Ito tells me.
After the film was out in the world, Ito felt, she says, as if “I don’t have to carry it anymore. I’ve shared it.” She stayed in the theater at Sundance and watched the credits roll and people’s reactions. “And I felt like, ‘Here you go. It’s out of my hands.’”
The summer before the world premiere, Ito moved to Berlin to prepare for whatever would come once the documentary was released. “I was a little nervous and wanted to have a safe place,” she says. “Just emotionally, it’s nice to think, If it’s going to be difficult in Japan, I still have a home to go back to in Berlin.”
When I speak to her over the summer, Ito is visiting Tokyo to take meetings with potential film distributors. Since Sundance, she feels like she’s “made two and a half trips around the world,” taking her film to festivals everywhere from Azerbaijan to Hong Kong. Reactions have varied by region, she says. “As a director, I’m always like, ‘Oh my gosh, what are they feeling?’” She cites one moving moment when two male survivors of sexual assault shared their stories after a screening in Toronto. “The majority of the world isn’t there yet,” Ito says, “but this film is a great way to open discussion, a first step.”
Black Box Diaries will open in New York City on Friday, and it will come to streaming platforms early next year. By the end of 2024, Ito will have screened her film in more than 30 countries around the world, but not at home in Japan. At press time, her team was trying to confirm a theatrical release there, in 2025; whenever it happens, Ito plans to be there for opening night. “I know I will get a harder reaction in Japan, but I hope that if I bring this film physically to a cinema, Japanese people will have to face it,” Ito says. “So hopefully we can have a discussion, because that’s not the kind of culture we have.”
More than four years after her assault, in December 2019, Ito won her civil case, with a judge finding that Yamaguchi was liable for damages for having sex with Ito without her consent and while she was unconscious; Ito was awarded about $30,000. She was also ordered to pay Yamaguchi about $4,800 for accusing him in her book, without evidence, of drugging her.
In June 2023, the Japanese parliament revised the definition of rape from forcible sexual intercourse to nonconsensual sexual intercourse; the law now includes survivors who are coerced by someone in a position of authority and those who are unable to consent due to intoxication or lack of consciousness. The age of consent was also raised to 16 from 13.
Ito still has more laws she’d like to change, but once she’s done promoting her documentary, she’s looking forward to getting back to reporting other people’s stories. She recently went on a 10-day silent meditation retreat. After she started speaking again, she proposed to her boyfriend, a Thai muay thai instructor, whom she met when she took lessons for protection and he was her trainer. “I told him, ‘I don’t know what to think about the future, but I want to be with you,’” she says.
A few years ago, while she was editing the film, Ito traveled for a friend’s wedding to Yakushima Island, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in southern Japan. She’d always wanted to try skinny-dipping, and a beautiful remote island with hot springs seemed like the perfect locale. So one moonless night, she thought, ‘This is my moment.’ Alone in the darkness, floating free and weightless in the warm water, she felt herself as nothing more than a living, breathing creature. “I took off all of the labels. After so many years of being ‘that girl who was raped,’ I realized I can’t change or control how people see me. At that moment, I just felt like, ‘I don’t care who I am—if I’m a woman, a daughter, a journalist, a victim, whatever—I was just a breathing, naked little being in the water.’”
“You’re the only one who can tell you who you are,” she continues. “After that, editing went a bit easier, walking around the world became a bit easier.”
A version of this story will appear in the December 2024/January 2025 issue of ELLE.
