When Shiori Ito was assaulted by a friend of the prime minister, the police dismissed her. She fought to get justice in a society where consent is disregarded. Now she’s a heroine for her country’s women.
In the revolution of consciousness that acquired the tag #MeToo, there were many heroes and villains, but none like Shiori Ito and Noriyuki Yamaguchi. In certain ways, theirs was an archetypal encounter — the young woman with talent and ambition; the successful and influential middle-aged man offering help, advice and opportunity. Yamaguchi was a prominent Japanese television correspondent, rather than an American film producer, and Ito was an aspiring journalist, rather than an actress. But the broad outlines of their story, and the events of that evening, are familiar from the stories of Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby and many other sexual predators in Hollywood, business and the media.
Like many victims, Ito was lured with the promise of a career break in an intensely competitive field. Like them, she was violated by a man who assumed that his power and prominence would shield him from the consequences. At first, she was paralysed by trauma; when she tried to report what had happened, she was let down and brushed off by police and prosecutors.
She went public, was harassed, menaced and insulted, but largely ignored by the Japanese media. The legal net finally narrowed around Ito’s attacker, only for him to spring from it in the most baffling and murky of circumstances. Like many of the most explosive #MeToo cases in the United States, the truth was eventually exposed through the labours of a stubborn and determined journalist. But unlike the victims of Harvey Weinstein, she did not have a team from The New York Times or The New Yorker to tell her story. The job of investigating, documenting and exposing the story of Shiori Ito has been accomplished by Shiori Ito herself.
Patiently and assiduously, first in a book and now in a new documentary film, she unfolds the remarkable and complex sequence of events. On one level it is a #MeToo story about a predator exposed — except that Noriyuki Yamaguchi has never faced justice for the attack, which Japanese courts agree that he did commit. It is also the tale of what appears to have been a dark conspiracy, stretching to the very top of the Japanese government. And it is a fable about Japanese society, and the risks taken by those who defy its unwritten strictures and codes of silence.
To go public about sexual assault, especially by a respected and influential man, is an act of bravery anywhere in the world; to do so in Japan, a country in which many hold conservative views about shame and female purity, is doubly courageous. Ito not only set off Japan’s #MeToo movement — in plenty of ways she is the movement, certainly its most admired and prominent figurehead. To a cabal of right-wing conservatives, she is a bête noire; to many women, she is a hero, known simply as Shiori.
“She was the first woman to come forward,” says Mari Miura, a professor of political science and a feminist scholar at Sophia University in Tokyo. “She’s the one who really kicked off the whole movement in Japan, even before #MeToo started in Hollywood. She was brave. She exposed her face and her name and she suffered a lot — there were threats and a huge [amount of] bashing against her. And she was the journalist as well as the victim. I think she made a really big change to Japanese society.”
What formed this unique and heroic personality? I first met Ito a few years ago, after her involuntary ascent to prominence, and there is nothing self-consciously heroic about her. She is a warm, humorous woman of 35, a striking, stylish, understated presence in casually elegant clothes. She was born and grew up in Kawasaki, one of the outer cities of Tokyo’s vast urban sprawl. Her father designed and built billboards; her mother was a nurse.
“My family say I’m a black sheep,” she says now, in a coffee shop near her apartment in west central Tokyo. “I just followed the Japanese public education system [where] you can’t really say what you think. Or you can question something, but then you have to follow everyone anyway.”
While she was at school, she worked part-time as a model. As a pretty young girl, it was fun; as a beautiful young woman, it became more complicated. “It was a difficult time,” she says. “I started feeling more that I’m an object. That I have to keep looking a certain way, that I have to look more feminine, that I have to take care of my skin.” But the money she had earned enabled her to embark on something that her parents could not otherwise afford — an exchange programme in the United States.
In Kansas, she acquired her fluent, American-accented English. Returning to Kawasaki 9kg heavier and tanned, her agency, which liked its models pale and skinny, lost interest. She began studying journalism in New York, and working in a bar to make ends meet. It was there, in 2013, that she first met her assailant.
Who is Noriyuki Yamaguchi? Later, the question would come to matter a great deal, but at the time there was no obvious mystery. He was a successful, medium to high-ranking television journalist, Washington bureau chief for TBS, one of Japan’s big five national broadcasters — a respected TV face at most, but to an ambitious 24-year-old like Ito, exactly the kind of person she needed to be meeting. Yamaguchi introduced her to another Japanese correspondent, who gave her an internship. “As far as I was concerned, Mr Yamaguchi was a successful journalist, someone who knew a lot of people and was friendly about making introductions,” she would say later. “Nothing more, nothing less.”
In New York, her money ran out. Back in Japan, she got an internship at Reuters in 2015 and began to cast around for something more permanent. She emailed Yamaguchi who quickly replied; he was back in Tokyo for a few days, and they arranged to have a conversation the following week about the prospects for a job in Washington. They met for a drink in a bar in central Tokyo — for the first time, and to her mild discomfort, it was just the two of them.
On the way from the bar to a restaurant, Ito remembers, Yamaguchi pointed out other restaurants and named the famous politicians, including a former prime minister, with whom he had dined in them. Over sushi, they shared two small flasks of saké (in terms of alcohol content, a bit more than half a bottle of wine). Ito went to the lavatory as a third was being ordered. After she came back, she began to feel dizzy, and tottered to the loo again.
“The next thing I remember was waking up in a hotel room,” she would eventually say in court, in testimony that is read aloud in her documentary, Black Box Diaries. “I woke up with intense pain in my lower abdomen. I didn’t know where I was or who was on top of me.”
It was Yamaguchi, and he was raping her. A laptop computer was facing the bed, unnaturally placed on a shelf: she suspected that it was filming. She tried to push him off, but he persisted. Eventually, he stopped and she ran to the bathroom. “In the mirror, I saw my nipple bleeding, bruises on my arm and other body parts,” she said. “Having no memory about what had happened, I was terrified.”
When she emerged, Yamaguchi tried to force her again. Her face was pressed into the sheet and she thought she was going to suffocate. “He was assaulting me. I was saying in Japanese Yamete kudasai — ‘Please stop.’ I was using the polite way of speaking, I couldn’t switch out of that. I had to say [in English]: ‘F*** off.’ Growing up in Japan as a woman, I just didn’t [know] how to use the language to express my feeling of anger and confusion.”
The English obscenity did the trick, and Yamaguchi abandoned his assault. She scrabbled around, desperately trying to find her underwear. “He said, ‘Let me keep it as a souvenir,’ " she remembered. “I felt the strength drain out of me.”
Eventually he handed it over. He said, “I like you. I can’t wait to take you to Washington. You passed.”
Black Box Diaries tells the gripping story of the next four years of Ito’s life, and her internal battle, between the journalist and the victim. The date rape drug that she believes she was given left her nauseous and reeling; it took months for her to recover from a dislocated knee. She was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). At one stage, her hair began to fall out because of the stress. But throughout all this pain, with the cool detachment of a reporter, she continued to document what was happening to her.
She began keeping video diaries on her iPhone. She recorded conversations with the police on a digital recorder hidden in her bra. Film-maker friends took to shooting her as she moved between the police, the courts and her lawyers. “At the beginning, I wasn’t thinking about making a film — I was just protecting myself,” she says. “Leaving some sort of footprint of what was happening to me. I didn’t believe that the police were doing their job. So recording was for legal reasons, rather than documentary.”
But it amounted to a rich mine of material: 400 hours of footage, personal and intimate, frequently raw, painful and sometimes light-hearted. At her lowest point, she is seen recording a video suicide note to her family. The shots that follow are of the view from her bed in the hospital that saved her after she tried to take her own life. Ito points out the most remarkable thing: even in the depths of self-destructive despair, she kept filming.
“I have to laugh — I’m trying to take my life and then I’m still filming,” she says. “I don’t understand myself, looking back. It’s a sign — you want to take your life, but you also want to survive and live.”
It was five days after the attack before she could bring herself to go to the police. When she did, she faced an emotional and physical obstacle course through a swamp of police sluggishness, excuses and institutional incompetence.
From the beginning, the detective in charge of the case — Investigator A, as he is identified in the film — was gruffly discouraging. Like many victims of rape, her first instinct had been to wash herself and all her clothes, destroying potential DNA evidence of what had happened. Ito was forced to go through a humiliating “re-enactment” of her attack, beneath a life-size doll representing her rapist. She was repeatedly asked whether she was a virgin, as if that had a bearing on the crime. But the police had CCTV footage from the hotel where Yamaguchi had taken her, a disturbing sequence which shows him half-carrying and half-dragging her out of the taxi.
The taxi driver described her confusion, disorientation and collapse. Eventually, traces of Yamaguchi’s DNA were found on Ito’s bra. It was enough — a warrant was obtained for his arrest. It was to be executed at the airport, as he returned from Washington on his next visit to Japan. On the scheduled day, Ito received a phone call from Investigator A with news that was hard to digest. He had been taken off the case, along with the lead prosecutor. “I brought the arrest warrant to Narita Airport,” he tells Ito, in her covert recording of a later conversation. “Four of us were waiting in the car. Then we got an order from higher-ups in the police saying, ‘Wait, halt the arrest.’ " Another detective told Ito that Investigator A had been thrown off the case “because he was good at his job”.
This is the point at which the story becomes very murky indeed. For Yamaguchi wasn’t just any television journalist. He was the biographer, and friend of the right-wing nationalist Shinzo Abe, Japan’s longest-serving prime minister (after stepping down, he would be killed by an assassin in 2022). At the time of the attack on Ito, Yamaguchi was close to publishing two books about Abe. The last-minute order to drop the arrest warrant came from Itaru Nakamura, then head of criminal investigations in the Tokyo Metropolitan Police. Nakamura had previously spent three years as a close aide to Yoshihide Suga, Abe’s most loyal ally and his successor as prime minister. Nakamura would go on to become head of the National Police Agency. Ito is hesitant to say so directly, because there is no direct evidence and, questioned in parliament, Abe denied any connection to the case. Nakamura said that the suggestion that he was under pressure to stop the arrest is “preposterous”. He told the Japanese magazine Shukan Shincho, “This had nothing to do with [Yamaguchi’s social standing]… the final decision was mine.” But the suspicion remains that Yamaguchi was spared prosecution because politically powerful friends in the Japanese government wanted the case to be dropped.
“I think it’s something to do with the relationship [between] Abe and him,” Ito says. “At that time he was speaking on TV about Abe, protecting, supporting Abe as a journalist, as a commentator. He’s been almost a spokesman of Abe. He was about to publish Abe’s biography… And then the case was dropped.”
When the investigation was formally closed in 2016, Ito might easily have slumped into resignation and despair. Instead, she brought a civil lawsuit against Yamaguchi, demanding ¥11 million (about $120,000) in damages. She held a press conference and publicly accused Yamaguchi under her own name. And she began doorstepping Nakamura to ask why he pulled the arrest warrant; he always evaded her. A sequence in her documentary shows one of these attempts — Ito and her camera crew running after the police boss’s car as it accelerates desperately away. “That was something I never imagined,” she says. “Chasing after the police.”
The press conference was largely ignored by the Japanese media, but it stirred up a wave of abuse against Ito, by email and social media. Much of it focused on her demeanour — calm, coherent, stylishly dressed, looking her audience in the eye — and her failure to conform to the received image of a rape victim.
“The fact is I am a victim,” she says. “But the stereotyped idea of victim jarred with me. The police told me, ‘If you don’t cry, if you just don’t act like a victim, it’s hard for us to believe.’ When I did the press conference as well, people told me that I should dress like a victim. I should dress up in a suit, no make-up, just so that people believe me. And I hated that.”
She told the press conference, “People need to know about the horrors of rape and how deeply it affects our life.” It was one moment when her voice cracked. On social media, one woman commented, “For a rape victim, she showed too much chest.”
It was May 2015 when Ito went public, five months before the allegations of sexual abuse against Harvey Weinstein that developed into the #MeToo movement. It is hard to overestimate the rarity in Japan of a rape victim stepping forward to identify not only herself, but her attacker, let alone such a prominent figure before any court ruling on his guilt or innocence.
There would be few others like her. Japan’s #MeToo was not a wave, so much as shifting of the ground — noticeable, but incremental rather than dramatic. There was an increased consciousness of sexual crime. It is difficult to know with statistical certainty, but it seems likely that more women came forward to report and accuse. A female soldier, Rina Gonoi, was subjected to a humiliating and public sexual assault by three officers of Japan’s Self-Defence Forces in 2021. After her complaints were brushed off by her superiors, she went to court and won their convictions.
Hundreds of men came forward to report sexual assaults by a famous talent promoter named Johnny Kitagawa — his company, Johnny’s, apologised and changed its name. But the men who assaulted Gonoi got off with suspended sentences; and Kitagawa had been dead since 2019 — during his 87 years of life, repeated accusations had been made against him, largely ignored by the police and the media. “It was too late,” says Ito. “I mean, it’s never too late, but it should have been done when he was alive, when Johnny had the power.”
Japan prides itself on its low rates of crime, including sexual crime — in 2021, the government acknowledged 1.11 rapes per 100,000 people, compared with 42 in the US and 53 in Britain. But differing definitions of rape, and the matter of unreported attacks, make the comparisons close to meaningless — you are not 50 times more likely to be raped in Birmingham than Nagoya. For many Japanese women, sexual assaults of various kinds, often perpetrated on public transport by the notorious chikan or gropers, are a part of life.
“A hand slipped into your underwear, your skirt cut open, semen ejaculated on you, being pushed down on the way home from school and your underwear removed, a high-school girl surrounded by five or six middle-school boys on the train and groped,” Ito wrote in the book that she published in 2017. “All these attacks happened to friends of mine. And the list could go on and on.”
As she spent time thinking and talking to people about sexual crime, she became aware that there was a fundamental problem with Japanese law, and began to speak out about it. Rape, as it was defined in 2015, was a crime of violence or intimidation, not of consent: to prove it, essentially, a victim had to prove that she had resisted (it always was “she” — rape of men was not recognised). This excluded cases in which a victim was paralysed by fear or by the social and professional consequences of resisting a powerful and authoritative assailant — a boss or teacher or sports coach. Sexual intercourse on an unconscious person was in a different category: the arrest warrant, which was never served on Yamaguchi, was for something called “quasi-rape” — “rapey” behaviour, but not quite the real thing.
In 2017 the law changed for the first time in 110 years, imposing longer sentences on rapists and recognising male victims, and recognising forced oral and anal sex as crimes as well. Last year, the law was tightened further still, raising the age of consent from 13 to 16. Crucially, rape is now redefined as a violation of consent, not as a crime of violence.
“We shouldn’t underestimate the legal change,” says Mari Miura. “Today, no means no, which is a huge, huge victory. Shiori was really the beginning of that whole change. What she did was really, really significant in Japanese society.”
Ito herself says that it was partly lucky timing. She lived in a time of CCTV recordings, when miniature audio recorders of the kind that she secretly carried were readily available. “If it was ten years ago, fifteen years ago, I don’t think I could have used the same tools to prove the truth,” she says. “It always happened behind a closed door. But finally, we have these tools to protect ourselves, to prove ourselves, that it’s not just, ‘He said, she said.’ "
The evidence was there for those who chose to see it and in 2019, Ito won her civil claim against Yamaguchi. The judge ruled that he “had sexual intercourse without consent with Ms Ito, who was in a state of intoxication and unconscious”. This ruling, which was upheld on appeal, was the finding of a civil, not criminal, court. Yamaguchi’s only penalty was damages of ¥3.3 million ($36,000).
He continued to insist that he was innocent of wrongdoing, that the sex was consensual, and that Ito is “more or less a habitual liar”. But his career as journalist was over; he had, he said, been “murdered socially”. Today, Yamaguchi (who did not respond to a request for comment) presents eccentric commentaries on current affairs called Yamaguchi Intelligence Eye on a YouTube channel. After the court ruling, he gave a press conference at which I asked him if, despite insisting on his innocence, he had any regrets about his actions that evening. “I really regret what happened,” he said. “I, she, suffered a lot. She got so many PTSD.” Then he added, apparently unaware of the irony, “Me too.”
The scene is one of several moments of dark comedy in Ito’s film. It’s a brilliant work — angry, but controlled, subtle and humane. Nine years after Ito and Yamaguchi walked into a sushi restaurant, it is still difficult to say whether it is a chronicle of victory or defeat.
Written by: Richard Lloyd Parry
© The Times of London