Japan's Secret Shame
日本の秘められた恥
Storyline
The whole story, ending included.
Shiori Ito's fight after accusing a prominent television journalist of rape, and the police, the law and the online abuse she faced.
Japan's Secret Shame, made by True Vision for BBC Two's This World and directed by Erica Jenkin, was broadcast on 28 June 2018. It follows the journalist Shiori Ito through the months after she went public. It opens on the typed words of the emails she exchanged with Noriyuki Yamaguchi, a well-known television journalist and the author of an admiring biography of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, after a work dinner in Tokyo in April 2015. Ito says she passed out and woke to find him raping her. He says she drank heavily and that the sex was consensual.
Ito, 29, retraces what followed. Back at the hotel for the first time since, she crouches down and says she cannot stay. She describes being made to lie on a dojo mat at a police station while male officers re-enacted the assault with a life-size doll and took photographs. An arrest warrant was never executed; the case was dropped. Since her press conference in May 2017, strangers online have called her a prostitute and targeted her family, and she checks her home with a bug detector.
Around her the film sets the wider picture: a rape law, unrevised for over a century until 2017, that asks for proof of violence or threats rather than the absence of consent; a police force eight per cent female; students never taught that sex without consent is rape; Tokyo's one support centre for victims, which told her, when she phoned, to come in person. Motoko Rich of the New York Times says many suspect political interference. The Liberal Democratic Party lawmaker Mio Sugita says Ito made errors as a woman by drinking so much in front of a man. In September 2017 a prosecution review panel ends any chance of charges, and Ito turns to a civil suit. As support grows with #MeToo, she concludes that speaking out, whatever it brings, is far better than silence.
Starring
Shiori ItoHerself
A 29-year-old freelance journalist, followed through the months after she publicly accused a prominent television journalist of rape.
Mio SugitaHerself
A Liberal Democratic Party member of the lower house, interviewed as a defender of Yamaguchi, who says Ito made errors as a woman.
Motoko RichHerself
The New York Times bureau chief in Tokyo, who had reported on the case and says many suspect political interference in it.
Jake AdelsteinHimself
An American journalist long based in Tokyo, credited as the author of a memoir of reporting on Japan's police beat.
Why it matters
Japan's Secret Shame asks why so few women in Japan who are raped go to the police, and what happens to one who goes further and speaks in public. It lays the pieces side by side: a law that asks for proof of violence or threats rather than the absence of consent, a police process in which a woman describes an assault to men and re-enacts it with a doll, one support centre for a city of thirteen million, and a public that answered Ito with abuse. The sharpest moment belongs to a governing-party lawmaker, Mio Sugita, who places the fault with the woman who drank; her remarks drew criticism in Japan after the broadcast. It reached viewers in Japan only online, in March 2019. It is a foreign camera looking in, and it leaves the shame where its title puts it: not on the woman who spoke, but on the systems that made speaking so costly.