Asian A.V. Club newsletter #33: Shiori Ito
Journalist, activist, author, and now documentary filmmaker, Shiori Ito talks to us about her gripping film Black Box Diaries and the lasting impact it continues to have on her.
[JUST A QUICK NOTE: This story contains mention of sexual assault.]
In 2015, Shiori Ito set up a dinner meeting with Tokyo Broadcasting System Washington bureau chief, Noriyuki Yamaguchi, seeking advice on her career as a journalist. The meeting took a horrible turn when the elder Yamaguchi took the intoxicated Ito to a hotel and, against her wishes, raped her.
Upon filing a police report, Ito quickly discovered the extent of Yamaguchi’s connections, and also how archaic Japan’s laws and protections for sexual assault victims were.
Against the advice of her family and even the authorities, Ito decided to go public with her allegations. Very quickly, she became the face of the #MeToo movement in Japan, facing an equal measure of victim-blaming and discrimination. Because of the very public nature of her case, the overwhelming experience prompted Ito to write her 2017 memoir, Black Box.
Now, seven years later, Ito brings the documentary Black Box Diaries to our screens. Featuring never-before-seen video diary entries, secret recordings and a first-person account of her story, the powerful film has become a battle cry for survivors wherever it is shown.
We got the chance to talk to Ito recently and basically felt a need to also check in on her at the same time.
Asian A.V. Club: Shiori! We are big fans of yours ever since we watched your documentary at Sundance Film Festival in January and have been eagerly waiting for the chance to speak with you. I read somewhere that you wanted to pursue a career in journalism at a young age. What inspired your curiosity back then?
Shiori Ito: I grew up in Kawasaki, a city next to Tokyo, and it's really industrial. As a middle-class kid growing up in Japan, and going to a public school, you never can really question anything, even if you're feeling something. You can’t be different; you can’t break from the harmonious society and classroom. As someone who is super ADHD, now I know why it was really hard for me to just follow because I always questioned so many things.
When I was 12 or 13, I ended up really sick and spent one and a half year checking what’s wrong. I was able to go to school and the hospital and that’s it. But that whole experience was a great moment to realize that it's just okay to be alive and that I didn’t want to follow what my little Japanese community wanted me to be. So, I took my chance, and I found this program to do an exchange year in the states. On my resume, I wrote that I love animals and I love nature, and they sent me to Kansas. (laughs)
Asian A.V. Club: That might have been a culture shock!
Shiori Ito: Totally! I grew up watching MTV, The O.C., so all I knew was east coast or west coast. I had no idea where Kansas was. And my classmates had no idea where Japan was. Of course, they're like, “Oh, great. You’re from Japan. What part of China is that?” That was the starting point. I also realized that most of my classmates never left Kansas to start with, and I saw how information can form people. At that time, I was craving for news and information from outside. So, I started watching a lot of it and also thinking, you know, I love moving around and meeting new people. I felt like this is what I wanted as a profession, to be a journalist. And that's where I started.
Asian A.V. Club: Returning to Japan with that Western mindset, how did it feel to pursue a journalism career there?
Shiori Ito: It was hard, especially for me, to imagine working in Japan. I did an internship at a TV station, and realized women are sort of like support, so I was pretty sure that I didn't really want to work for a Japanese company or even in Japan. But if you want to be a journalist, I felt with writing, I could never beat a native English speaker, I felt I wasn’t good enough. So, that was the time that I started to think about photojournalism and moved into video journalism too.
But through this film, I’ve met many great Japanese women, who could be super successful. But they just decide to leave Japan because of the working environment, the lack of maternity leave and how we have to have the female role in the family and society. If you don’t update the view, it’s just not worth it. Japan has been losing so much great female talent, they almost lost me too. Because now we know there's other parts of the world that's slightly better. It's not very perfect, but slightly better.
Asian A.V. Club: Having the experience that you did, and then going public and becoming the face of a movement, how did you handle being at the center of it all? Is it kind of like a Clark Kent/Superman scenario in which you could switch on your super strength when dealing with everything and then turn it all off when you close the door?
Shiori Ito: As a survivor, for me, there was really one way of surviving and that was I’m wearing the mask as a journalist. I could have some distance to what happened to me, and I could always treat the case as maybe I'm covering someone else's story. Because of that, I wanted to ask more questions, I wanted to take more steps. That was my natural self-defense. I never felt like I could switch on and off, and that's maybe one of the reasons why I wanted to make this film. Because I felt like at some point, my mask as a journalist stuck on my face. I couldn't even feel what I was really feeling, but I knew I had to face myself. The emotion and the trauma were not going anywhere, so that's when I felt like I needed to discover and explore through filmmaking. I wanted to tell the story from the point of view of a survivor too, not just dealing with it as a story seen through the point of view of a journalist.
Asian A.V. Club: When you decided you were going to transfer your experience from Black Box the memoir into Black Box Diaries, the documentary, was there an editorial decision on how to tell this story through a visual medium?
Shiori Ito: From the very beginning, the rape wasn't the focus on this film. It was all about what happened afterwards, and what I wanted to do as a survivor. So, I didn't want to traumatize myself or anyone who is watching it. I definitely didn't want to put anything visually speaking to the violence, that was something I was careful about. I also decided to not put all the details of what happened towards the beginning. I didn't want people to carry the trauma or have a visual thought in their head. So, I only decided to reveal what really happened towards the end.
Asian A.V. Club: As a journalist, we are trained to never be the center of the story, so what was it like to turn the camera on yourself?
Shiori Ito: It was difficult, but I think for me again, it was really important to tell this story from my point of view and to let other people know. Because of everything that was happening in my life, it also felt natural to record of it on my phone. But with the cameras, I was fortunate that all the people behind the camera were my friends. It was really intimate, and we always felt like we just needed to document what was going on, because we had so many questions on that. Documenting was okay, but editing was a completely whole different process. (laughs)
Asian A.V. Club: How much footage did you guys have?
Shiori Ito: It was over 400 hours. [Pauses while I’m gasping] I know. I had an amazing editor (Ema Ryan Yamazaki), who's patient, who had the heart, who had the space in her. She understood that I sometimes needed to take some time away from the film. There were some experiences that I didn’t even remember. That’s how trauma works. So just remembering and revisiting the nightmares sometimes was really tough. It felt like I was exposing myself every day during the edit.
Asian A.V. Club: To then put it out there in the world and show it to people, what has the experience been like, because it doesn’t really belong to you anymore.
Shiori Ito: At the moment of the [Sundance] premiere, I just really felt like the story travelled off from my shoulder, and it's no longer just my story. When we finished the Q&A, the person from the theater just decided to put on the “I Will Survive” song. So, I just had to go back to the stage, grab the microphone, start singing, and my producer and best friend, was trying to pull me down from the stage, trying to risk manage everything. (laughs) But in the in the end, so many audience members came to join us to sing and dance together. I realized how many women; how many people had been through the same. It's so universal, and it's everyone's story. That was really amazing moment.
Asian A.V. Club: You’ve been touring this film at film festivals around the world and I’m sure you’ve had so many audience members come to you with their feelings and maybe even their personal stories. What has it like to be a recipient of their emotions?
Shiori Ito: Without realizing, somehow it can eat you up. When I went to Brazil, I almost had breakdown, I really had to figure out how I could deal with it. Right after that fest, I had 10 days off, so I did 10 days of silent meditation. There’s no best way to handle my own trauma, because I'm talking about it every day, I am discovering new ways for myself.
When people come to me, it’s okay if they want to share their own trauma, but I try not to take it in. Instead, I ask, ‘what’s your coping mechanism’, so we can share a more positive way to deal with it.
Asian A.V. Club: Even with this conversation, you have to represent and, in some way, give a piece of yourself by reflecting on what happened to you. How do you not let it affect you?
Shiori Ito: I'm still in a learning place, there's no right answer. With this crazy press tour, I try not to look at my schedule. I don’t want to know. (laughs) But with these interviews, I just want to be there as a human and just talk to the person in front of me. I was never good at public speaking, but I can definitely talk if I treat it like a normal conversation.
Asian A.V. Club: Do you still have the journalistic curiosity to tell other people’s stories?
Shiori Ito: I do! I want to do more feature filmmaking. I just love the experience being in a cinema to share the same space with an audience. This film took eight, nine years to make, but in between, I was reporting and making TV docs as well. But having that journalism background is so important. Just interviewing, researching, covering the story, always helped me to see the world and society in a different way. It also will help me find a new story to tell. I don’t think I’ll be able to go into a newsroom full time because I want to do more slower storytelling.
Asian A.V. Club: I think documentaries is an amazing space for you to tell other people’s stories. I can’t wait to see what you work on next. Thank you Shiori, I’m so very proud of you and what you’ve done through this film.
Shiori Ito: That’s so sweet of you to say. Thank you.
Looking forward to seeing this. Hope I get a chance in Hong Kong.