'Black Box Diaries': Sexual Crime Laws in Japan Are Messed Up

By Dustin Rowles | Film | March 15, 2024 |

By Dustin Rowles | Film | March 15, 2024 |

In America, Asian American and Pacific Islander history is not part of the high-school curriculum in most states (although there’s been a growing effort to change that). The knowledge most Americans have of AAPI history is largely limited to Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima. Even the Korean War gets short shrift in most American textbooks, while America seems intent on memory-holing the Vietnam War. For many of us, however, television and movies have been surprisingly instructive in recent years. We have learned about attempts to introduce Christianity into 17th-century feudal Japan from Shogun, Japanese rule over Korea in Pachinko, and how freedom of press works in practice in modern Japan in Tokyo Vice (Spoiler alert: Not great).

From Shiori Itō’s documentary Black Box Diaries (which premiered at Sundance and screened at SXSW), we learn about the sexual assault laws in Japan. They’re not great, especially for a relatively liberal democracy. Many people may not realize this, but it was only in 2023 that Japan finally included “consent” in the definition of rape. In other words, consent was irrelevant; a woman had to prove that there was force involved (it was also only last year that the legal age of consent was raised from 13 to 16).

These changes and a better understanding of consent and sexual violence in a country where most women are too ashamed to report rape came about, in part, because of Shiori Itō. In 2015, while she was an intern at Thomson Reuters, Itō was sexually assaulted by Noriyuki Yamaguchi, a prominent TV journalist and acquaintance of then-Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. She was black-out drunk (in her book, Itō claimed she’d been drugged), and Yamaguchi had to drag her out of a cab and to his hotel room over her objections. Yamaguchi escaped conviction because consent was not an element of the crime. It didn’t matter that she was passed out when Yamaguchi had sex with her. That is insane.

It was a big deal for Itō to report the rape to the police. It was a much bigger deal for Itō to hold a press conference and make her accusation public after the police declined to prosecute. Even her own parents objected, not because they didn’t believe her but because they thought the allegation would ruin her life.

It did not do her life any favors. After the police still declined to prosecute, Itō eventually brought a civil suit against Yamaguchi, and even that proved to be challenging, frustrating, and heartbreaking.

All of this is in Itō’s documentary Black Box Diaries, which she directed herself. It’s described as an intense thriller in which she investigated her own sexual assault, but that’s a little misleading. It’s mostly Itō’s account of her eight-year battle (that also included a memoir) to bring Yamaguchi to justice. Itō is a journalist, and though it was her own sexual assault, she attempted to cover her own case as a journalist. It’s a powerful documentary more for the story its telling than on its merits as a film.

Itō was at the SXSW screening of Black Box Diaries, and it says something about the culture of Japan that she has been bringing her documentary to other countries in the hopes that it will get enough attention that she can get it screened in her own home country of Japan. The stigma attached to sexual assault in Japan is so overwhelming that, again, her otherwise supportive parents don’t even know about the contents of her documentary. It’s also wild that while women in the United States were advancing the MeToo movement to rid various industries of rapists in the late 2010s, Japan’s MeToo movement was far more modest: Itō and others wanted to include consent in the definition of rape.

‘Black Box Diaries’ screened at the 2024 SXSW Film and TV Festival.