Japanese journalist Shiori Ito on Black Box Diaries, the film about her rape case that shook her country
- Shiori Ito’s documentary Black Box Diaries is a soul-baring examination of her sexual assault by a high-profile journalist and her five-year fight for justice
- The film showed at the 2024 Hong Kong International Film Festival, where Ito took part in her first post-screening Q&A session with an audience
Japanese journalist Shiori Ito has travelled a long and emotional road to get her documentary, Black Box Diaries, to the global stage.
A raw, soul-baring examination of Ito’s sexual assault by a high-profile Japanese TV journalist in 2015, as well as of the investigation and her five-year fight for justice, Black Box Diaries, based on her 2017 memoir Black Box, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, in the US state of Utah, in January.
This month, it was part of the 48th Hong Kong International Film Festival (HKIFF) and during a post-screening Q&A session, Ito, for the first time, got to gauge an audience’s reaction.
“It was my first Q&A straight after a screening and I could see the audiences’ emotions and how we connected – that was a whole new experience,” says Ito at the Mira Hotel, in Hong Kong’s Tsim Sha Tsui area.
Ito, 34, has a packed schedule as she takes the film on the road. But it is the date of this interview, April 4, that is symbolic: it was on this day, nine years earlier, that Ito says she was raped by TV journalist Noriyuki Yamaguchi in a hotel room after he invited the then Reuters intern to dinner to discuss a potential job.
Ito took the rare step of going public with the story in May 2017. The turmoil she felt as she decided whether to do so comes across loud and clear in the film. Also clear is the image of Japan’s patriarchal power structure. She is, after all, taking on a powerful man: Yamaguchi had close ties with the then-prime minister Shinzo Abe.
