Shiori Itō’s directorial debut, Black Box Diaries, has won acclaim around the world since its debut at last year’s Sundance Film Festival, recently earning an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary Feature. But there’s one place it hasn’t been seen: in the director’s native Japan.
The film, distributed in 58 countries globally and by MTV Documentary Films in the U.S., tells a first-person story of Itō’s attempt to seek justice and accountability after she was sexually assaulted by a prominent Japanese journalist.
“We’ve been struggling to bring the film to Japan, and we hoped the [Oscar] nomination can get us through,” Itō told us in Berlin before she headed to London for the BAFTAs over the weekend, where Black Box Diaries was nominated for Best Documentary. “But instead, the nomination created another backfire, pushback, and we still don’t have distribution or theaters to do it yet.”
Alarmed about the lack of distribution in Japan, two organizations in France took up the cause, launching a Change.org petition. Their online campaign notes, “Shiori Itō stood up against a system designed to suppress voices like hers. With extraordinary resilience, she has challenged deeply entrenched structures alone. Now, she needs our help to take the final step: bringing her story home.”
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The petition was originally posted in French, then in Japanese, and was recently translated into English. As of publication time, it has attracted almost 5,000 signatures. “Every signature brings us one step closer to opening Japan’s doors to this film,” the Change.org post says. “Every voice can help convince Japanese distributors and media to support this crucial project.”
As the documentary recounts, Itō was interning for Thomson Reuters in 2015 when she was invited to what was described as a business get-together with Noriyuki Yamaguchi, a well-known Japanese TV journalist with close ties to then-Japanese Prime Minster Shinzo Abe. During dinner she became inebriated, and Yamaguchi took her to his hotel, the Sheraton in Tokyo, where he allegedly raped an incapacitated Itō.
As shown in Black Box Diaries, police expressed reluctance to investigate the case, citing century-old rape laws in Japan that require evidence of a violent sexual assault to pursue any charges. Compelled to do her own investigating, Itō obtained CCTV footage from the Sheraton which showed Yamaguchi seeming to pull her out of his vehicle as they reached the hotel and then throwing his arm around Itō’s shoulder and forcibly moving her into the building as she struggled to maintain her footing.
Itō told Deadline it was a major challenge to get the hotel to release the footage.
“Because the hotel didn’t want to be on the side of revealing [a] customer’s privacy, they say they don’t want to release it,” she explained. “When I received the footage, which took quite a long time, they made me pay about $4,000 to blur people’s faces.”
That CCTV footage has become an impediment to getting the film distributed in Japan, notes producer Eric Nyari, who is Oscar-nominated along with fellow producer Hanna Aqvilin.
“People in general and theaters in this case are more risk averse in Japan than, for example, the States. And they feel more vulnerable to [legal] claims and trouble,” Nyari said. “And these theaters — including the theater who we had really the highest hopes for, who is our number one target — a lot of these theaters are not only owned by large corporations, they’re owned by large corporations that also own hotels. And, so, it’s a particularly sensitive case for them.”
“Distributors, they know it’s no legal issue,” Itō maintained, “so they’re more scared about the public voice.”
In May 2017, Itō held a press conference, going public with her rape allegation. That decision, highly unusual in Japan, earned her some support from politicians, but a tide of abuse and invective on social media from people dismissing her claims. When London-based producer Aqvilin reached out to Itō about potentially collaborating on a film, she advised Itō to leave Japan.
“I definitely felt like she couldn’t be there. She definitely couldn’t have started this film without her having a place where she feels safe to even think about how to tell this story,” Aqvilin said. “I was pretty naive as well when I reached out to Shiori because I had no idea what kind of threats she was up against, because at that time I had only seen the first press conference, and that’s when we got in touch with each other. And then I could really understand that she had no support whatsoever, not from the legal side, family and friends — obviously she had friends to support her, but a lot of people were super afraid, like really, really afraid over what’s going on and how that would impact them.”
Itō says she has been living out of a suitcase for the last year, traveling with a trusty yoga mat and a cooking pot in her luggage. She tells Deadline she doesn’t feel she can live in Japan because of the negative attention over her case and now the film.
“It was great [for] one year to travel around and see the cities and see the documentary community, which cities are good to live [in],” she said. “I’ve been kind of doing city hunting along the way.”
The effort continues to get Black Box Diaries seen in Japan.
“We’re still hoping that a brave distributor and a brave theater chain, not just one small theater, but a brave chain will partner with us, and we can have the kind of big release we had initially intended,” Nyari, the producer, said. “Obviously, if we win the Oscar, that’s a big thing, but we’ll see. I mean, we don’t know how the story is going to play out, for sure.”
“For me, the Oscar nomination is all great and we are so grateful, but this is just one pass that this film has to get through,” Itō said. “And me personally, my goal is to really distribute this film in Japan more than anything, more than Oscars.”
The post Shiori Itō’s Oscar-Nominated ‘Black Box Diaries’ Has Been Embraced Around The World. So Why Isn’t It Being Seen In Her Native Japan? appeared first on Deadline.
