Black Box Diaries (2024)

This documentary, which made the list of nominees for the 2025 Best Feature Length Documentary Oscars, shines an unflattering light on Japan's rape culture. Not that there was any doubt about this, but #MeToo extends beyond the borders of the United States, and this is a story that reveals that to be true. The story begins in 2015, when JPnese journalist Shiori Ito — then a 26-year-old intern at Thomson Reuters — went out for a drink with renowned TV reporter Noriyuki Yamaguchi, only to become intoxicated and taken against her will to his hotel room. Her allegations of ensuing rape are brusquely dismissed by police: Under a century-old Japanese law that has only recently been revised, sexual assault wasn’t necessarily defined by non-consent, especially if the victim’s resistance was not violent. Ito methodically lays out a national culture built to protect men’s honor first in such situations — in particular well-protected men like Yamaguchi, whose friends in high places include Shinzo Abe, then Japan’s Prime Minister (spoiler alert--he does not come off well here either). Discouraged by both the authorities and her family from taking the matter any further — at potential cost to her reputation and career prospects — Ito nonetheless goes public with her accusations in 2017, pursuing legal action against Yamaguchi and finding a publisher for her tell-all book “Black Box,” a volume intended not just to relay her experience but to prompt a reevaluation of Japan’s archaic sexual assault laws. Undeterred when the prosecution review board rules that she has no case, she transfers it to civil court instead, whereupon her fortunes gradually begin to shift, even as she faces hostility from the media and hate mail from the general public. This is a compelling tale--it opens with CCTV footage from the hotel where she was raped showing that we was carried into the hotel and tries to escape several times and then follow with Ito's interview with the driver that night backing up her story that she wanted to leave and her attacker wouldn't let her. We know the ending, and the film unfolds to show just how hard it is to get justice for sexual violence in Japan.