And the Oscar for Best Documentary Should Go to ... 'Black Box Diaries' (trigger warning)

[niyad]

And the Oscar for Best Documentary Should Go to … ‘Black Box Diaries’ (trigger warning)
PUBLISHED 2/27/2025 by Angela Bonavoglia

A searing testament to the power of journalism and resilience, Black Box Diaries exposes the systemic failures that silence survivors—and the fight to rewrite the law.




The image burns in the brain. We are in a cab, hearing audio of the driver’s voice on the night in question. An incapacitated Shiori Ito, 25, repeatedly asks the driver to take her to the train station. Beside her is Noriyuki Yamaguchi—Tokyo Broadcasting world honcho, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s associate and soon-to-be biographer—twice her age, whom she had contacted about a journalism job. He insists that the driver take them instead to his hotel. As the driver’s confusion becomes apparent, Yamaguchi gets more insistent. He won’t do anything, he says. He just wants to talk to her. In the end, the driver relents.

In silence, we watch grainy footage from the hotel CCTV as Yamaguchi gets out of the cab. When he sees that Ito has not followed him, his body language shows exasperation. He stretches into the cab and grabs her by the arm, dragging her out. Once she is barely upright, he keeps his hold on her as he pulls her forward, teetering on her high heels. We watch as Yamaguchi drags Ito’s body through the hotel lobby, her head bobbing and lolling, her wobbling legs trailing behind her. If ever there was evidence of a lack of consent from the start in what would become a landmark rape case in Japan, this is it. But consent was irrelevant under Japanese rape law. Besides, Yamaguchi was way too important to be held accountable for what happened next that night in 2015—after drugging her, he raped her as she lay unconscious. Ito awoke that night to Yamaguchi on top of her and no memory of what had happened before. When she tried to escape, he dragged her back and threw her on the bed—face smashed against the sheets, nipple bleeding, body bruised. “I thought I was going to die,” she said. Actually, when it was over, all he wanted was to keep her underwear, as a “souvenir.”

Black Box Diaries is an extraordinary, Oscar-nominated and deeply relevant achievement by this first-time documentary filmmaker. As both a rape survivor and journalist, Ito spent five years creating a cinéma vérité record of what it took for her to take on a powerful man like Yamaguchi. Black Box Diaries builds suspense as events unfold chronologically, using a cinematic potpourri. It includes Shiori Ito’s surreptitiously obtained audio recordings of her being interrogated, denigrated and disbelieved, as well as her inventive, at times disturbingly off-kilter, imagery—from a kitchen floor, under a table in what looks like an interrogation room, outside the partial facades of cold-stone office buildings. These shots reflect the off-kilter patriarchal world she is struggling to capture and call to account.
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For American audiences, Black Box Diaries is a reminder of the worldwide impact of the U.S. #MeToo movement and of all of the places on this planet where no such progress has begun. It is also a visceral and highly original cinematic portrayal of what it took for one determined, creative young journalist—despite the suffering she endured that night and all that came after, including the vitriol—to persevere, to challenge power and to force change. And force it she did. Besides holding Namaguchi (who described his interaction with her as “a misunderstanding”) accountable, Shiori also influenced something even greater: In 2023, Japan added consent to its rape law.

Black Box Diaries is available to stream on Paramount Plus

https://msmagazine.com/2025/02/27/black-box-diaries-oscar-documentary-academy-award-rape-japan/