Documentary film “Black Box Diary”, which received an Oscar nomination a few weeks ago, is a personal chronicle of one young female journalist who courageously stepped forward in public as the survivor of a high-profile case in Japan several years ago. Mostly sticking to her viewpoint, the documentary focuses on how much she struggled for standing against the sexist sides of the Japanese society and its legal system during next several years, and her painful story of defiance and struggle feels quite important even at this point.

She is Shiori Itō, and the documentary, which is directed and co-produced by Itō herself, opens with what happened to her at one late night of 2015. At that time, she was a promising young journalist working in Tokyo, but she was raped by a certain influential journalist, who was incidentally the Washington D.C. bureau chief of the Tokyo Broadcasting System. Despite being quite drunk, she naturally tried to resist this vile dude, but he eventually took her to his hotel room as shown from a video clip from the security camera of that hotel, and that is where that horrible incident occurred.

After struggling to process what happened to her at that night for a while, Itō reported her traumatizing incident to the local police, but, not so surprisingly, the local police were not so willing to do the investigation. The first investigator assigned to her case actually became more sympathetic to her as delving more into the details of her case, but he was soon replaced with some other investigator for no apparent reason, and he later told her that the chief of the Tokyo Police nullified the arrest warrant for her rapist at the last minute.

Needless to say, her rapist was quite an influential figure with a lot of political and professional strings to pull. As a matter of fact, he was a very close ally/friend of many prominent Japanese politicians including Prime Minster Shinzo Abe, and Itō was surely aware of how risky it was for her to report to the local police from the very beginning.

After the Tokyo Police virtually disregarded her case, Itō became more despaired, but she eventually found some strength for coming forward to expose her rapist in public two years later. As a result, she had to endure a lot of misogyny from the media as well as the public, but there was also a considerable amount of support for her, and she is surely consoled by that while also feeling a bit better about herself than before.

Itō and her crew members including cinematographer Yuta Okamura closely followed her long and difficult struggle during next several years, and we often see how she often felt uncertain and insecure about whatever might happen next after her public allegation against her rapist. Fortunately for her, she had some close friends willingly standing by her, and she also had several lawyers ready to help her as much as possible, but she sometimes could not help but feel vulnerable from time to time, as shown from her occasional personal video clips.

Things became all the more serious when Itō’s memoir, which is titled “Black Box”, was about to be published. By coincidence, the biography of Abe written by her rapist was going to be published around the same time, which also happened to be not long before the day of an important national parliament election. Once her book got published, she would get definitely sued for defamation by her rapist sooner or later, and that made her and others around feel more pressured than before.

Above all, it seems that their opponents were willing to silence them by any means necessary. While nearly all of the local media companies in Japan remained rather silent about her allegation against that vile dude, both the Japanese government and the Tokyo Police continued to deny everything in public, and Itō and others around her became more aware of the possibility of being monitored by their opponents. At one point, she could not help but notice a certain van parked near her residence for hours, and there is a cheerful but rather alarming scene where she and a friend of hers look for any eavesdropping device in her current residence.

Because of its narrative constantly being driven by her viewpoint, the documentary looks a little too subjective at times, but Itō comes to us as a brave woman who simply refuses to be merely labeled as a victim, and you will certainly come to root for her more as observing more of her hard journey toward justice. When her rapist sued her as expected, she and her supporters surely braced themselves for more fight and struggle, and the documentary does not miss a rather ironic side of what eventually happened in the end.

Overall, “Black Box Diary”, which is incidentally not scheduled to be released in Japan yet even at this point, is worthwhile to watch for illuminating the sexism and misogyny inside the Japanese society, and it also made me reflect a lot on how the South Korean society has also been quite problematic in similar ways for many years. Sure, thanks to the #MeToo movement around the world, the women in the South Korean society are not easily silenced these days, but our society is still stuck with misogyny and sexism just like many of other countries in the world, and I can only hope that many good documentaries of the #MeToo era like “Black Box Diary” will bring more awareness to our society.