A film made with cold courage by the victim of a sexual assault, this gripping Japanese documentary plays like a ’70s conspiracy thriller. Eavesdropping devices are ripped out of apartment walls, secret recordings made, the abuse of strangers is fended off, and the full might of a patriarchal state faced down. You can imagine a young Jane Fonda or Faye Dunaway playing its young heroine, journalist-filmmaker Shiori Ito, as she pursues the man who raped her with every means at her disposal.
Depressingly, it’s set much more recently. In 2015, as a young female journalist, Shiori was raped by veteran Washington bureau chief of the Tokyo Broadcasting System, Noriyuki Yamaguchi, in a hotel. The man’s connections ran all the way to Japan’s then-Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, for whom he’d served as biographer. Even as the traumatised reporter went to the police, the wagons were circling. Yamaguchi’s arrest was mysteriously called off at the last minute and criminal charges were never brought against him.
Refusing to leave it at that, Shiori published an account of her experiences, going public with her accusation against Yamaguchi called ‘Black Box’ in 2017. A potent metaphor for the secrecy at the heart of Japan’s antiquated and sexist system, the title also hints at its plane-crash impact on the lives of victims like Shiori.
Shiori is a fragile but unbowed figure standing in the middle of a typhoon
She also picked up a camera, filming her battle to bring the man to justice through the civil courts – and there’s a power in this subject-filmmaker treatment that another filmmaker, one with more distance from the case, would struggle to deliver.
Shiori’s intimate video diaries are unvarnished, often tear-stained affairs, as her trauma pours out after another day of legal dead ends or triggering memories. At other times, a more distanced camera captures her at the heart of a story that shook and polarised Japanese society – a fragile but unbowed figure standing in the middle of a typhoon.
The trigger warning at the start of the film is there for a reason. It’s an unsparing, fly-on-the-wall journey through a legal and societal hellscape that raises at least as many questions as it answers. How even seemingly benevolent men can be exploitative at best, predatorial at worst, and for how the media, politicians and the wider public are all complicit in the worst kinds of victim-shaming.
As Black Box Diaries charts, in anguished detail, only four percent of Japan’s rape victims report the crime (it’s 30 percent in the US). Watching this troubling but deeply absorbing film, it’s easy to understand why.
In UK and Ireland cinemas Oct 25.