In stories about sexual assault, you often hear of survivors’ bravery. Because with every rape they suffer two assaults; the original attack and then the aftermath, in which they have to negotiate their trauma while living a new, unwanted identity as a survivor.
Journalist Shiori Ito is all too familiar with the concept – even unintentionally became the figurehead of Japan’s #MeToo movement – after she was raped while unconscious in a Sheraton Miyako Hotel Tokyo hotel bedroom following dinner with a colleague.
When she decided to go public about her ordeal, she was subjected to a shocking hate campaign.
Shiori, who believes she was drugged, went to the police following the attack in 2015, but after being let down by their inaction, she courageously held her own investigation, facing huge societal wrath for doing so.
The trolling and online hate got to such a level that Shiori was felt forced to leave Japan, and since last year has based herself in Berlin while travelling all over the world as a journalist documentary filmmaker.
‘I had to move away. I was receiving so many threats, whenever I heard people speak Japanese it would make me feel unsafe,’ Shiori tells over a phone call.
‘I felt safer when I heard English or a different language. It [the trolling] is still happening but I can avoid it because I have an assistant going through emails so I don’t open my mailbox in the morning and find these hateful messages.’
In Japan, where speaking of rape remains taboo, only 4% of survivors report their cases to police. Victims and those around them may be stigmatised and even ostracised from society. But Shiori had no choice to speak up as police and prosecutors failed to deliver justice for the attack.
Shiori’s ordeal began after she emailed high-ranking TV correspondent Noriyuki Yamaguchi to ask about employment after they met, more than a decade ago. The pair agreed to meet up in a Tokyo bar to discuss work. They ate sushi and drank a moderate amount of saké, but when Shiori started to feel lightheaded she took herself to the bathroom.
That was all she could remember of that night. Her next memory was of waking up in a strange hotel room in the early hours.
‘I woke with intense pain in my lower abdomen. I didn’t know where I was or who was on top of me. I tried to push him away, but he was too strong, and I panicked,’ Shiori explains in her new documentary Black Box Diaries, which chronicles her experiences.
As she recalls her harrowing ordeal to Metro, it’s clear she’s relieved to have completed the gruelling process of filming and editing the programme.
Shiori recalls how she told Noriyuki she needed to go to the bathroom, broke free and ran to the toilet, locking the door behind her.
‘In the mirror, I saw my nipple bleeding, bruises on my arm and other body parts. Having no memory about what had happened. I was terrified. I needed to calm down, find my clothes and get out.
‘When I opened the door, he grabbed my arm and forced me onto the bed. My face was pressed against the covers. I couldn’t breathe. I thought I was going to die’, she says in her film.
Shiori pleaded with him to stop, before swearing at him and getting away. She asked for her underwear; which he said he would keep as a souvenir, before changing his mind and returning it. She left the hotel at 5.50am and made her way home.
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The horrific attack understandably left her traumatised; in subsequent years, she suffered from nightmares and panic attacks and her hair started to fall out. She fell into spells of immobility, where her body wouldn’t move for days.
Before a suicide attempt, she filmed a tearful final message for her parents, but was taken to hospital and her life was saved. In the years that followed, the sight of cherry blossoms would bring on panic attacks because they triggered her memory of the spring assault.
After the rape, Shiori went to the police to make a report, but the response was poor. In Japan in 2015, rape could only be proved by severe physical violence and threats and not by lack of consent, according to 110-year-old laws, and the person in charge, ‘investigator A’, told her there wasn’t enough evidence the case was dropped.
So Shiori started investigating what happened herself; interviewing the taxi driver who drove the pair from the bar, examining CCTV footage from inside and outside the hotel and gathering transcripts of her conversations with investigators and prosecutors, because ‘from the beginning, I didn’t feel like they were doing their job.
‘All I heard was excuses. So I hid a small recorder in my bra or whoever I could,’ she explains.
What Shiori uncovered was disturbing. The taxi driver told her she had asked two or three times to be let out of the cab at the station, but that Noriyuki had insisted that they go to the hotel. CCTV footage from outside the hotel shows her being half-dragged from the car, and inside, another camera shows a dishevelled Shiori pitching to the side as Noriyuki escorts her by the arm through the lobby.
A doorman later told Shiori that she tried to escape and had been moaning and seemed intoxicated.
In June that year, Shiori was told by another officer that Investigator A had been ‘transferred because he was good at his job. That is all there is to it’. He later got in touch with her, off the record, telling her that the police did in fact have a warrant, that Noriyuki was due to be taken in, but just before they stopped him, officers had a call from the ‘higher ups’ telling them to halt the arrest.
‘If I go against the higher-ups, I’ll be known as a traitor. I still don’t know why they stopped the arrest,’ Investigator A told her.
Could it be because of Noriyuki’s connections? Noriyuki was biographer and friend to former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and had links to Itura Nakamura – then head of criminal investigations at Tokyo Police. The case was discussed in parliament but Abe refused to address it.
In May 2017, Shiori decided the only way she could see justice would be if she were to go public with a press conference. She told journalists: ‘Since the incident, I’ve focused as a journalist on seeking the truth. I had no other choice. If I were to face myself as the victim, I would be crushed mentally.
‘People need to know about the horrors of rape and now deeply it affects one’s life. By becoming a victim for the first time, I learned how unheard our voices are…The typical expectation of a victim, to be sad and weak, to hide and be embarrassed, I had a problem with this norm. I had nothing to hide. If I don’t speak now, the law will not change. That’s why I’m coming forward,’ she says.
However, Shiori received a mixed reaction, and sections of the media ignored her. Elsewhere, she was lambasted; accused of being a ‘sex friend’ wanting revenge, of trying to advance her career and setting a honey trap.
One commentator criticised the journalist’s choice of blouse: ‘For a rape victim, she showed too much chest.’ She was called a prostitute, because the top button was undone. Another said she should be ‘choked’.
Shiori received death threats, cyberbullying, and hate mail which sent her on a downward spiral. She left her home for fear of press intrusion, and stayed at her friend’s where she would wake in the night, panicking.
Unable to work, she didn’t like being seen in public and received hate mail, with one woman telling her: ‘I feel so bad for the man you are accusing. Shame on you.’
Once, when reading an article about Noriyuki online, Shiori suffered a panic attack, as the page rolled down to reveal his forehead.
When she published a book about her investigation in 2017 and bought a 11 million yen (£77,000) civil claim against Noriyuki, he countersued for 130 million yen (£667,000).
However, Shiori’s landmark case saw success.
The Tokyo district court ordered Noriyuki, who consistently denied the allegations, to pay Ito damages and dismissed his counter suit. In its written ruling, the court found that Shiori was ‘forced to have sex without contraception, while in a state of unconsciousness and severe inebriation.
‘We acknowledge that the plaintiff continues to suffer from flashbacks and panic attacks until now.’
Shiori stood outside the Tokyo District Court with a sign stating simply ‘Victory’, as crowds cheered and cried.
Noriyuki appealed the verdict, but the Supreme Court upheld Shiori’s victory and she went on to support other women and the #MeToo movement, sparking a national protest movement against sexual violence.
The movement brought forth other cases of sexual assault by high profile people, let to activism to reform criminal law and in 2020, the government announced a plan to reduce sexual violence in the country.
The law was changed in 2017, imposing longer sentences on rapists, and last year, the age of consent was raised from 13 to 17. Rape is now defined as a violation of consent, not as a crime of violence.
Four years ago, Shiori was named as one of Time’s 100 most influential people in the world, and she won the One Young World Journalist of the Year award in 2022.
At a press conference following the court’s decision back in 2017, British Journalist Richard Lloyd Parry addressed Noriyuki: ‘You’ve asserted very clearly that you have done nothing illegal. However, when you look back on the events of that night, do you have any regrets?’
Noriyuki replied: ‘I really regret what happened. Because I – she got so many PTSD – and me too. So it was just a really unfortunate incident, and I have regrets ethically. But still I have to claim that I didn’t do anything illegal.’
Sadly, although Shiori’s movie is available across America and Europe, it still hasn’t found a distributor in Japan – but Shiori remains optimistic.
‘I pushed myself to the limit in shooting this documentary. Upon revisiting the hotel where I was raped, I felt the damage I was doing to myself might be too much,’ she admits.
‘We filmed over 400 hours of footage over eight years. And the editing part was like a really hardcore, exposure therapy session. It forced me to revisit the time that I wished I could forget about.
‘It really was a challenge. But as soon as the film premiered, I felt it lift off my shoulders.’
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