Shiori Ito’s Searing Documentary ‘Black Box Diaries’ to Open in U.S.

“Black Box Diaries,” a documentary about Shiori Ito’s fight against Japan’s patriarchal justice system, opens on Friday in the United States.

If there’s one question Shiori Ito hates, it’s “What’s next for you?”

Ms. Ito, 35, is a journalist who became the face of #MeToo in Japan when she went public with rape allegations against a well-known television correspondent after an encounter in a Tokyo hotel room nine years ago. She later won a civil suit against him.

Now, as she prepares for the American and British theatrical release on Friday of “Black Box Diaries,” a bracing documentary she directed about her experiences fighting against Japan’s patriarchal justice system, she is tiring of questions about how she plans to continue the fight against sexual violence.

“Are you going to be a politician? What are you going to do about it?” audiences — and journalists — frequently ask her after seeing the film. “I want to scream back, ‘What are you going to do about it?’” she said. “‘You watched it. Now it’s with you, you take it, it’s not me. I did everything I can do from my side. Don’t ask me anymore.’”

It’s the kind of defiance, unorthodox for a woman in Japan, that has made Ms. Ito, whose film debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in January, a feminist hero in some circles and a punching bag in others.

Ms. Ito spoke during more than two hours of conversation over dinner in Fukuoka, in southern Japan, where she made a brief stop earlier this month between film festivals in Busan, South Korea, and Zurich. She described her emotional journey from despair at being betrayed by the police, prosecutors and the Japanese media to triumph when she performed a karaoke version of “I Will Survive” after the Sundance screening.

“I felt such a big release,” Ms. Ito recalled, tucking in to pieces of chicken grilled by a server at the table. “I was like, ‘This is it!’ and we shared it.”

Kim Yutani, director of programming at Sundance, described the film as “completely singular in its exploration of healing, both on a systemic and personal level.”

By the end of this year, “Black Box Diaries” will have been screened at more than 50 film festivals and released in theaters in countries including Belgium, Canada, the Netherlands, Singapore and Thailand, in addition to the United States and Britain. One notable exception: Japan.

Ms. Ito and her producers suspect that Japanese distributors are leery of screening a film about such a controversial case. The man she accused of attacking her, Noriyuki Yamaguchi, was an influential former Washington bureau chief of the Tokyo Broadcasting System and a biographer of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who was assassinated in 2022.

“Black Box Diaries” follows the police investigation in Ms. Ito’s case and shows how prosecutors ultimately dropped it, saying there was not enough evidence.

At first, Ms. Ito recorded all her encounters with the police and prosecutors to protect herself. But after the criminal case was dropped, she decided to go public with her allegations in a news conference in 2017, overriding pleas from her family to remain silent. The night before she went in front of reporters, she recorded a video diary entry on her iPhone. The video opens the film.

Critics on social media and in right-wing publications swiftly attacked Ms. Ito, accusing her of wearing a too-revealing outfit — because she left one button undone on a blue collared blouse — during the news conference. It was another small sign of Ms. Ito’s rebellion: Other Japanese journalists had advised her to dress in the kind of conservative black suit that job applicants wear to interviews. “I said a strong ‘No’ to having a uniform on me,” she said.

Some of the criticism was much harsher, and Ms. Ito fled to London at the invitation of Hanna Aqvilin, a Swedish television journalist who had heard about her case. Ms. Ito spent a couple of months sleeping under an Ikea desk in Ms. Aqvilin’s apartment as the pair began to discuss a documentary project.

When Ms. Ito returned to Japan to begin compiling evidence for a civil suit and to write a book, Ms. Aqvilin accompanied her and stayed in her apartment for nine months, in part because Ms. Ito was scared of retribution by the police or political actors.

Together, they began filming most of Ms. Ito’s activities. With Ms. Aqvilin often behind the camera, Ms. Ito would address her in English, which partly explains the documentary’s bilingual dialogue. But even when filming herself, Ms. Ito said she often found it easier to express herself in English. In Japanese, “I never felt like I had a language to be angry or be emotional as a woman,” she said.

Ms. Aqvilin kept the camera rolling to capture as much as possible. Ms. Ito “never told me a single time, ‘Turn off the camera,’ or ‘I don’t want this to be filmed,’” Ms. Aqvilin said.

Ema Ryan Yamazaki, a documentary filmmaker who edited “Black Box Diaries,” waded through more than 400 hours of footage covering five years, sometimes discovering content that Ms. Ito did not remember, including a tormented suicide note to her parents that she had recorded on her iPhone. An unvarnished clip of that video appears in the film.

In another scene that Ms. Ito did not recollect until Ms. Yamazaki asked her about it during editing, Ms. Ito calls a police detective to inform him that she will be using in her book some of the background information he had given her, including that the police had been poised to arrest Mr. Yamaguchi at the airport when a superior called off the operation. As Ms. Ito speaks to the investigator on the phone, he seems to confess romantic affection for her.

Ms. Yamazaki said she worried about putting the scene in the film because viewers might doubt the investigator’s testimony, given his feelings for Ms. Ito. But Ms. Ito ultimately was determined to show how women frequently have to navigate men’s emotions and urges. “This is part of many women’s lives,” she said. “I feel like even if you trust someone this can happen.”

She considered constructing a more traditional documentary with interviews of family members or legal advisers. She even briefly mulled trying to land an on-camera interview with her attacker. She experimented with stop-motion video, using a blowup doll similar to the one the police had forced her to use to demonstrate what had happened during her assault.

In the end, she simply leaned into the richness of the real-time recordings.

“It was really important for me to share what was happening at the time, not what I’m thinking today,” Ms. Ito said. “I believe I remember what I was feeling at the time, but I don’t know, I have changed a lot too.”

Once the year of touring film festivals and trying to secure a distributor in Japan is behind her, Ms. Ito hopes to start making documentary films about other subjects. “What I love is to listen, to interview,” she said. “This year it’s been really difficult because I just keep talking.”

During a keynote speech earlier this month at a gender equity forum in Kurume, a suburb of Fukuoka, Ms. Ito spoke for more than 90 minutes to an audience of about 300, some of whom had lined up an hour before the auditorium opened. She showed a short documentary she had made about female genital mutilation in Sierra Leone.

“When you hear about F.G.M. and the faraway country of Sierra Leone, it may seem like a very distant place,” she said. “But there are certainly many things like that in Japan as well,” she said, comparing the violence suffered by girls in Africa to violence against women in Japan.

Yoko Nakamura, 55, who had come with her daughter, Otoha, 22, said she was inspired by Ms. Ito’s message of refusing to adhere to cultural expectations.

“I want people to stop thinking about hiding or enduring or categorizing people as ‘women’ or ‘people with disabilities,’” said Ms. Nakamura, whose daughter is developmentally disabled. “I think Shiori feels this way too.”

Kiuko Notoya contributed reporting from Tokyo.