In 2021, award-winning filmmaker and journalist Shiori Ito published her memoir Black Box. In it, she detailed the investigation process of her own sexual assault case. Ito, 26 years old, was an intern at Thomson Reuters in Tokyo, while her high-profile assaulter had close ties to then Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
Her work received the Free Press Association of Japan’s Best Journalism Award in 2018 and was translated into ten languages. Her incendiary call for justice was the backbone for large-scale reform in Japan. Alongside being credited for sparking the nation’s #MeToo movement, her outspokenness led to the much-needed update of the country’s century-old laws around rape, including the increase of the age of consent from 13 to 16.
Premièring at the Sundance Film Festival three years after her memoir, her debut feature documentary, Black Box Diaries, went on to win a Peabody award and received Oscar and BAFTA nominations. Ito was aptly named one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in 2020, and is the co-founder of Hanashi Films, a documentary film production company. This March, UBC's Centre for Japanese Research screened the film at the Chan Centre alongside a talk from Ito.
Black Box Diaries is a pastiche, overlaying audio recordings on shots of Tokyo, CCTV footage, footage from Japan’s House of Representatives, Ito’s personal diary entries and videos from her childhood. The majority of the clips were secretly recorded by Ito, putting vulnerable conversations on display to truly expose the challenges of seeking justice when dealing with the legal system. It is a deeply personal piece of work documenting Ito’s own journey. As a woman, the insight the film provides has embedded itself in my body — Black Box Diaries is a significant achievement, both in terms of the well-stitched storytelling as a result of the editing and Ito’s record-keeping.
The documentary opens on a kind note of self-preservation, urging the viewer to close their eyes and take a deep breath when needed, as Ito herself does. The scene that follows is CCTV footage of an intoxicated and near-incapacitated Ito being pulled out of a taxi by her assaulter, then held up and walked through the Sheraton Hotel’s lobby. I was immediately vertiginous with fear, and to my horror, it was revealed that this could have been avoided — the taxi driver who later testified recounted Ito’s insistence on being dropped off at a train station.
In the documentary, Ito secretly records conversations with bureaucrats and legal personnel involved in her case. She struggled with her internal conflict as a journalist and a storyteller, which stemmed from the questionable ethics of these secret recordings, particularly the discussions with an officer identified as Investigator A. When she first began recording, it was to protect herself and personally inspect the police’s investigative methods.
Investigator A begins uncaring and distant, first informing Ito that she has no case without physical evidence of assault. Later, he informs Ito that a warrant for her assaulter’s arrest has been issued but quickly revoked following the instruction of Investigator A’s superiors. The scene is a vulnerable in-person conversation initiated by the investigator, in what I can only presume was the hope of letting Ito in on the full picture.
Fearful of surveillance, the documentary shows Ito ordering a wiretap detector. She laughs at how mundane the request sounds. A black van has been stationed outside of her residence, prompting the search for something concrete to help dispel her warranted apprehension. Ito walks around her apartment, the detector ceaselessly beeping. A few minutes in, she remembers the wired mic she has on, the shedding of which promptly halted the detector's noise.
This feeling of paranoia is not baseless — Ito told me she was made to re-enact the events of a night so traumatic that people are often unable to recount them verbally. When Ito first reported the assault, she requested to speak to female officers, and her request was granted. She then spent hours reliving her personal hell before the officer apologized, revealing that she actually belonged to the traffic department — “I was so devastated,” she said in an interview with The Ubyssey. “Why didn’t [she] just tell me first?”
When Ito was finally redirected to the investigators, they were all male. Beyond her verbal account, they forced her to use a life-size doll, which was to double as her assaulter, in the re-enactment of said account. “I do understand why, [in 2017], only 4 per cent of survivors would go and report [the assault], because it’s a lot to do,” she said. It is frankly unimaginable how anyone could report their own cases given the ensuing ludicrous process.
When Ito finally speaks about her assault to a full room of women, the scene is cathartic. These women, working in media in Harajuku, share their own experiences with assault and thank Ito for speaking out. She stands at the front of the room like she had in front of a panel of reporters when she first went public with her case. Except this time, her tears are born of visceral relief. “When I speak, I always feel like I am standing here naked. But today, it feels like I am covered with blankets,” she tells the women.
The scene is a testament to the imperceptibly obvious — supportive figures are important in creating a safe space for survivors of sexual violence, not only those presently choosing to come forward, but also for those that might decide to in the future.
Having distanced herself by adopting the journalistic lens when writing her memoir, Ito wanted the documentary to be imbued with the personal. She wanted to expound on how trauma functioned in her story and the overarching need to understand it further. The recordings allowed her to do just that. “There are so many amazing films that deal with [sexual violence], but it's always done [in the] third person … That's what I can do, and to let other people experience and wear my shoes to see — what is it like? Not tell the story as an informative format of what happened, but to experience it.”
She grappled with this desire in post-production and as the events she documented unfolded around her in real-time. One of these moments arrives in the film when, in a heartbreaking moment of clarity, she confesses how she has not been facing herself. In the editing room, she was bothered by the straight-on angle that the camera took — it made it seem as if she was speaking to the audience when, in reality, her speech was directed toward the person behind the camera – Hanna Aqvilin. Aqvilin helped Ito escape from Japan, and the two became close friends, with Aqvilin joining Black Box Diaries as a producer. Ito felt this kind of perspective with the camera unfitting and spent a year with a visual storyteller to film stop motion in her apartment as replacement.
Though only a few excerpts from this undertaking were included in the documentary, it contributed to the total four years invested in editing. I was stunned at her hesitance as I thought of my experience watching the film. Though she was speaking to Aqvilin or whoever was behind the camera at the time, it felt like Ito was talking to the audience, talking to me. I received the conversation Hanna received – the heavy admission of emotional fatigue, the triumph of deciding her memoir’s title, the guilt of possibly jeopardizing her family. In my eyes, she achieved what she had set out to achieve.
Having studied documentary filmmaking in her own academic career, Ito’s trained eye found inspiration for more intimate storytelling in two key documentaries — For Sama (2019) and Strong Island (2017). Both deal with personal stories of loss and life, and both encouraged Ito to imbue her own documentary with the personal details of her journey. Intertwined with sharing the personal is taking control of one’s own narrative. Ito said that when a person deals with the aftermath of sexual assault, “many people around you will tell you what to do or how you feel, how you should feel, [but] at the end of the day, you are the only person who knows what really happened to you.”
Since the investigation into Ito’s case began, it has become unsafe for her to live in Japan. This has only been exacerbated in the years since, especially with the recent theatrical release of the documentary in December of 2025 in her home country, despite it being released worldwide in 2024. “It was another experience of losing home,” she said, “losing what I know, what I felt like was my home, so I still carry that in me. And that is still difficult to me. Every time I go home, I feel threatened, I feel scared … I have to learn how to live with that. But after releasing the film finally in Japan, I don't feel comfortable living there again.”
Parallel to this loss, her travels elsewhere have increased — now, Ito speaks at high schools, universities, and international forums. She particularly enjoys visiting universities, especially in North America, where she has noticed there is a greater atmosphere for debate. She’s perhaps most motivated by the possibility of inspiring change in the next generation. She noted the younger generation as more action-oriented and forward-thinking.
Having visited over 80 countries, she marvels at the enormity of all there is to see in the world, such that it continues to fuel her filmmaking ventures. She has been involved in documentaries filmed in Sierra Leone, Turkey, Peru, Japan and other places worldwide. Every time she visits a new city, she purposely forgoes public transportation in favour of walking. It provides her with the opportunity to learn something new, which is at the root of what she loves — meeting new people.
The little moments in Black Box Diaries are where Ito inadvertently shows parts of herself that make her who she is — how easily she laughs, how she can locate the pulse of humour and revel in it, even in the more frustrating junctures. But she keeps the conclusion as sobering as the introduction. In the closing scene, the lightness created by Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” is sliced through by a shot of Ito’s face. The sudden absence of Gaynor’s proud phoenix-like anthem plummets the scene into haunting silence. Ito’s smile falls away, staring out the moving car’s window and devoid of the prior amusement. I was reminded of the scene where Ito wins the civil court case against her assaulter. Speaking to journalists outside the courthouse, she takes the time to reiterate that this victory does not signify the erasure of her lived trauma. The suffocating stagnancy of Ito’s outward gaze allows the gravity of this documentary to sink in.
Black Box Diaries is deserving of the accolades it has received, an impressive and engaging feat in storytelling, the indefatigable pursuit of justice and the myriad complex nuances of being vulnerable.
