[KineJapan] Ito Shiori Marches On

[Rea Amit]

Thank you, Markus, for this detailed discussion of Ito’s important work. I
watched it some time ago and also recommended it to my students. I must
admit that some of her strategies for eliciting input about her case in the
film made me feel a bit uneasy. However, given the extreme risks she is
taking, I find these ethical gray areas not only justified but also
integral to what makes the film so powerful. While I’m not sure I would go
so far as to compare her to Okuzaki, she occupies a unique position as
journalist, filmmaker, and the film’s main subject, making a personal
intervention that is both courageous while at the same time also quite
intimate.

One point I would add, though, is that the film seems to be catering from
the outset to a Western viewership. At least in the version I watched in
the U.S., a significant portion—maybe about half?—was in English. Ito often
speaks directly to the camera in English, which gave me the impression that
her entire approach was that of gaiatsu from the beginning. This is not a
critique of the film or its significance, but it may be another factor to
consider when thinking about its local distribution. I don’t recall
watching Japanese documentaries that make such extensive use of English,
especially from some of the filmmakers mentioned above. This makes me
wonder whether this might be a new factor in post-Ogawa aesthetics—beyond
just ethical considerations. It raises interesting questions about how
contemporary Japanese documentary filmmakers position their work within a
global viewership and whether this shift reflects broader changes in
distribution (including streaming), funding, or the intended scope of their
interventions.


On Tue, Feb 18, 2025 at 8:42 PM Markus Nornes via KineJapan <
kinejapan at mailman.yale.edu> wrote:

> As I’m writing a book on post-Ogawa ethics in Japanese documentary, I’ve
> followed the comings and goings of Ito Shiori with some interest. Coming
> and going because she bounces between two curiously disconnected
> controversies. One is mainly restricted to Japan and the other is global.
> Both are of her own making, though in completely opposite ways. Tomorrow
> there will be competing press conferences in Japan from Ito on the one
> hand, and her lawyers on the other. It promises to be interesting. I
> thought I’d jot down some notes. They are admittedly messy, but I thought
> I’d share them since it will undoubtedly hit the news tomorrow.
>
> *Black Box Diaries* is streaming on Paramount+ and so I finally got a
> chance to watch the film the other day and consider for myself the claims
> regarding her ethical shortcomings.
>
> Make no mistake, the film is a real achievement. It’s extremely
> compelling, a righteous condemnation of sexual violence. Ito shows
> remarkable strength in the face of (mostly anonymous) powerful men, while
> revealing the wages the rape took upon her psyche. While she’s clearly
> damaged and delicate, her inner resources and determination and resilience
> is incredibly moving.
>
> The film is extraordinary and precious in many ways. It will go down as an
> historically important documentary for being a MeToo film from the point of
> view of a victim who refuses to remain silent. Notably, while Weinstein was
> brought down through the efforts of journalists who carefully protected
> their sources, Ito is herself a journalist and telling her own story. One
> wonders if this—that she is taking many risks in revealing her own
> story—leads her to careless treatment of her own sources.
>
> This brings me to the two controversies. The foreign one is stoked by
> Ito’s representation of her difficulty to find distribution in Japan. She
> attributes this to misogyny baked into the institutions, powerful men
> keeping the film down, and things like that. She explains her strategy of
> showing the film abroad first, to put pressure on distributors—a kind of
> gaiatsu. But this is the strategy for all filmmakers. Just as Oda Kaori is
> in Berlin right now, one starts at the major festivals and then works on
> domestic distribution.
>
> Ito attributes her difficulties to the distributors, and there’s now a
> round of Japan bashing focused on them. Even a petition with over 4,000
> names. Her US distributor has a tweet claiming the film has been banned in
> Japan. This is so disingenuous. It’s annoying because there are many brave
> distributors who have not flinched in distributing even more controversial
> films. The film would be easy to distribute in Japan had she not had this
> set of ethical problems that open both she and her distributor to expensive
> litigation (one wonders what she wrote about this in her E and O forms for
> the foreign distribution….).
>
> The short version of the domestic controversy goes like this. Ito records
> and deploys without consent various video and phone conversations with the
> taxi driver that took she and Yamaguchi to the hotel, the hotel employee
> that greeted them, a whistleblower she calls “A,” her own lawyer, and
> attendees of an event on sexual violence. She also used surveillance
> footage of her arrival at the hotel with Yamaguchi, where she is visibly
> incapacitated, despite an agreement with the court and her lawyers that it
> was for her own reference, not for public exhibition.
>
> The film premiered at Sundance in 2024, but the consent issues didn’t
> really come out until her own lawyer raised objections in an extraordinary
> October press conference. If you want to learn more, there is a full
> rundown and excellent reporting out of the situation by Rina Hasumi in
> *Medium*
> <https://medium.com/@rina.hasumi/oscar-glory-or-ethical-breach-questions-black-box-diaries-faces-219b37ba318d>
> .
>
> As far as I can see lawyer Nishihiro has focussed on the use of the hotel
> surveillance footage. She argues that it is incredibly difficult to secure
> the cooperation of individuals and institutions in gathering evidence for
> rape cases. Thanks to Ito blowing past her promises for confidentiality, it
> will make it all the more difficult to collect evidence for future cases.
> If the basic red line in documentary ethics is “Do no harm,” the
> film—argues Nishihiro—fails here. At the same time, she understandably
> resents the very existence of secret lawyer-client recordings, let alone
> their inclusion in the film without consent.
>
> Actually, I differ with Nishihiro on the hotel footage. Her claim of harm
> is fairly speculative and ultimately hard to judge. It is significant that
> they are dark long shots, too distant and grainy to identify other people.
> And the identify of the hotel is well-known. As victim in these images, Ito
> Shiori possesses or “owns" them in a special way. Whether what she did
> broke laws or not I do not know. She definitely broke a promise, but this
> is strong, visible evidence of the crime at the heart of the matter. It is
> cold surveillance footage. It is obvious she has been drugged. Their usage
> harms only Yamaguchi, and he deserves it. The footage basically proves the
> case. Yamaguchi deserves the entire film, and the broadcast of his crime
> across the planet.
>
> I’m more interested in the scenes and practices that are dubious,
> especially for someone who proudly reminds every interviewer and audience
> that she is a journalist.
>
> As I watched *Black Box Diaries, *I could not help thinking of Hara
> Kazuo’s *Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On.* Both Hara and Ito embark on a
> quest to provoke, record, and preserve testimony of atrocious wrongdoing.
> Both weaponize image and sound technologies that possess that special
> ontological status that captures the stuff of reality, which makes visual
> and aural evidence palpable, immediate, powerful and believable.
>
> But actually, when you get right down to it, Ito is less like Hara and
> more like Okuzaki. Both are relentless. Okuzaki is, not surprisingly, the
> more brutal of the two. But both brazenly pursue their recordings with a
> fervor that drives their respective films.
>
> But the differences are instructive.
>
> First, Okuzaki is on an insane mission from God; his mission has a
> metaphysical dimension, as he is doing this not just for the correction of
> historical record but to sooth the souls of the dead. Ito is on a righteous
> quest for justice, both for herself as victim and for social justice in the
> broadest sense, even geographically since her story has spread the world
> over. And *now.*
>
> More importantly, Okuzaki’s strategy is completely open and transparent.
> Not only does he command Hara to record his encounters, but when his
> victims call for help *he* calls the police. And when they arrive, he is
> completely honest in describing his deeds. What’s more, he ultimately went
> to prison for them.
>
> In contrast, Ito is completely surreptitious and opaque. Her unethical
> lack of transparency is inscribed in the photography; when she starts
> non-consensual encounters, the aim of the camera is haphazard and random.
> In one scene, a friend who now takes on the burden of her dubious
> filmmaking practice, photographs Ito and Whistleblower A with a hidden
> camera. The graininess from the darkness and the distance from the subjects
> mark the shot as deeply problematic.
>
> The final substantive difference is that Okuzaki is recording his
> confrontations with the perpetrators of the crime; Ito is secretly
> recording her *mikata*. *Black Box *has a scene at the end where Ito had
> her opportunity for her Okuzaki moment. She attends a press conference by
> Yamaguchi, but doesn’t ask a question.
>
> A common point between the two films is lack of informed consent. Hara and
> Okuzaki barge into private spaces and conduct their violent interviews
> before a 16mm camera crew; they are visible, but do not announce or explain
> their intentions or plans.
>
> Ito’s relationship to informed consent is more complicated, but also
> instructive. Her friendly taxi driver has no idea he’s being shot, and it
> seems he didn’t know until after Sundance. Interactions with her lawyer are
> split into two modes: sometimes Ito has permission to shoot and uses a
> locked down, well-composed camera records meetings; other times Ito is
> shown secretly recording their conversations on speaker phone. She only
> learned about this when she saw the finished film.
>
> Ito did find one government official to speak to her on camera; but the
> same scene shows a nearby staff member hiding from the camera behind a
> screen—in other words, refusing consent. The camera pans away from the
> speaker and aggressively zooms up on her, as if condemning her refusal to
> be photographed (even though she was merely standing to the side).
>
> The two most disconcerting problems around consent are for Mr. Chikuba the
> hotel worker that greeted them in the lobby. The other is Whistleblower A.
>
> In one of the most powerful scenes in the film, Ito records a phone
> conversation where Chikuba graciously gives his consent to her use of his
> private testimony and even his name in court, knowing full well that it
> could draw unwanted attention and perhaps the punishment of his employer.
> “I will do anything for you,” he says. He is the hero of the film.
> Unfortunately, the scene is tainted by her lack of transparency. The entire
> conversation is in the film. She does not inform him that she’s recording
> their call, so obviously she also fails to ask for permission to use their
> conversation in the film. In the face of Chikuba’s courageous assent to go
> public, Ito’s hidden camera seems to capture something quite opposite. A
> cowardly fear that they will say “no”? Embarrassment knowing she was doing
> something wrong—especially for a journalist? Or was it an
> anything-goes-for-the-film indifference to the thoughts and feelings of her
> heroic supporter? There is nothing in the film that suggests she merely
> forgot to ask. It is something else. What?
>
> The other revealing example of the complexity of informed consent comes
> with Whistleblower A, the cop in charge of her case who was feeding her
> behind the scenes information—taking great risks of his own to help her. In
> her surreptitiously obtained recordings with him, Whistleblower
> A repeatedly reminds her how exposure of his meetings would damage his
> career. Before the hidden camera coffeeshop meeting, Ito speculates, “Maybe
> he wants to come out and tell the truth and be a part of it…” But at the
> coffee shop he once again explicitly refuses to give her consent to speak
> publicly. And asks for complete secrecy.
>
> She and her defenders assert his identity was concealed because they call
> him Detective A. This is nonsense, as he is identified as the officer in
> charge of her case, his reassignment is mentioned in the film, and it’s his
> employer who he fears. (And his physical appearance is hardly concealed in
> the coffee shop scene.) Being a journalist, Ito surely understands that
> it’s up to the whistleblower to decide whether or not, and when, to reveal
> their secret collaboration.
>
> Afterwards, she walks down the street she gives her cameraperson a
> debrief:
>
> “I don’t know what’s the good thing to do. If you’re a journalist that
> would go really into the politician’s …house…they have to know you’re a
> journalist, and they have to know this can get out. And our job is to tell
> the truth. But he is a good guy. So....ack! (sic)”
>
> Here she reveals that she knows it’s wrong to shoot him without consent.
> But she also reveals a warped sense of journalism: as a whistleblower he is
> depending on his journalist to protect him. Indeed, the most impressive
> thing about the books about the Weinstein reportage was the remarkable care
> reporters afforded their sources. We only learned Deep Throat’s identity on
> his terms, in 2005; Woodward and Bernstein protected him for over 30 years,
> and we knew only that there was an informant in the government.
>
> In *Black Box Diaries,* Ito and her defenders assert his identity was
> concealed. This is nonsense, as he is identified as the officer in charge
> of her case, his reassignment is mentioned in the film, and it’s his
> employer who he fears. Furthermore, his physical appearance is hardly
> concealed in the coffee shop scene. Being a journalist, Ito surely
> understands that it’s up to the whistleblower to decide whether or not, and
> when, to reveal their secret collaboration. This is less like journalism
> and more like Okuzaki’s mission from God.
>
> Ito does ask Whistleblower A for consent. *Sort of. (*And, rather
> ironically, she makes this request while he admits he’s intoxicated.) She
> reveals that she’s writing a book. He tells her it’s a good idea, but that
> she can’t use his name (clearly he implies this would embargo his
> subterfuge as well, but she does not confirm this). He continues,
>
> “Is there anything I can do?”
> “To be honest, I’d like you to speak out.”
> “If you marry me, I will.”
> (She laughs for him, and silently gives a disturbed look to her
> cameraperson.)
> “…but we are headed in the same direction. But as long as I work for the
> police, I can’t take a stand in your civil case.”
> A minute later, he suggests going out for ramen.
>
> This is positioned as a moment of quasi-consent in the film; he affirmed
> her need to write a book. But, first, this was not informed consent, as she
> did not tell him she was recording him or that she planned to use the
> recordings in her film. And second, this fellow is helping her, feeding her
> inside information about her investigation, and yet she includes that yucky
> joke about marriage. In one sense, it is yet another Metoo moment and her
> reaction suggests that’s how she took it; it needs to be in the film. In
> another sense, it’s not terribly kind. Also, it has been reported that he,
> too, learned of the recordings only when the film was shown publicly.
>
> *Black Box Diaries *is a very good film. If she had shown the care for
> her Mikata it would have been a great film. She needs to watch the films of
> her *senpai,* like Tsuchimoto, Ogawa and Soda.
>
>
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