Black Box Diaries

Storyline

The whole story, ending included.

Ito's self-filmed account of her case; Oscar-nominated abroad, released late at home, in a revised cut, after a dispute over consent to footage.

Black Box Diaries is Shiori Ito's record of her own rape case, built from footage she and friends shot over most of a decade. In April 2015 Ito, a 25-year-old intern hoping for a job, had dinner in Tokyo with Noriyuki Yamaguchi, the Washington bureau chief of TBS and a biographer of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. A hotel's security camera shows him pulling her, barely able to stand, from a taxi. She says she woke to find him raping her. He denies it.

An arrest warrant was issued, then called off from above while officers waited for him at the airport, and prosecutors dropped the case. In 2017, against her family's pleas, Ito gives a press conference under her own name and face. Hate mail follows. She checks her flat for bugs, moves to London, writes the book Black Box and sues Yamaguchi in civil court.

She works the case as a reporter, ambushing the police official she believes stopped the arrest and recording calls with a sympathetic detective, Investigator A, who confirms the warrant was halted and, drunk, propositions her. A hotel doorman who saw her dragged inside agrees to testify. In her video diaries she vows never to take her own life; later, at her lowest, she apologises to her parents and tries to, and the next images come from a hospital bed.

In December 2019 the Tokyo District Court rules in her favour. Handwritten captions close the story: the doorman kept his job; Itaru Nakamura, who halted the arrest, went on to head the National Police Agency; and on the day Abe was shot in July 2022, the Supreme Court let her victory stand. The film omits that the courts also made her pay him 550,000 yen for writing, unproven, that he drugged her. At the end she rides through the tunnel from the opening, singing 'I Will Survive', her face sliding from joy into grief.