She covered her own investigation in order to restore a truth that she had been forbidden to challenge publicly. It concerns the rape of journalist Shiori Ito, committed by a high-ranking journalist close to the Prime Minister. In the documentary Black Box Diaries, she recounts this quest for recognition, capturing moments of struggle, doubt, difficulty, but also great vulnerability.
Shiori dissects the institutional building blocks of a system that attempts to silence protests against rape, even at the highest levels of government. She was not simply denied an investigation; she was initially denied the right to file a complaint, the right to articulate and formulate words to denounce the rape she had suffered.
Justice was not served in 2017, even after rape was incorporated into the Japanese legal system in 2023 as non-consensual sexual intercourse. Prior to that date, the concept of consent did not exist, reflecting the weight of a societal view in which rape was defined only by the use of physical force and by ‘assault and intimidation,’ thus applying the term rape to very specific and limited scenarios, leaving room for an extremely narrow interpretation of the legal text.
This definition also reflects a deeply rooted societal perception that reduces rape to a brutal, animalistic act accompanied by clear and insistent signs of fear, without emphasising consent.
Outside of these patterns, violence, which sometimes manifests itself in more subtle or insidious ways, is ignored or minimised, and cases where rape has indeed taken place but does not fit this image are systematically dismissed.
The problem lies in this hierarchy of violence: if an act does not seem abrupt or shocking according to the collective social imagination, which often links violence to a scale of intensity, then rape becomes too strong a term to be used.
This perception reinforces the idea that the rapist must correspond to a specific archetype, that of the frightening, cold, virile and macho man. While some rapists do fit this type, this single vision limits the recognition of countless situations where rape has indeed taken place, thus rendering victims invisible and making it more difficult to report the crime. The profile of a rapist can never be pre-established: he can exist in all types of social dynamics and circles.
In Shiori Ito’s story, the perpetrator is a man who has achieved everything, who is educated, who has access to the highest echelons of Japanese society, and who, in the eyes of everyone, knows how to behave and treats women with respect. His attacker appears to be a man who does not use violence as a weapon, yet it is society’s misinterpretation of violence that gives the impression that if a person does not use overt violence, they are devoid of any form of violence.
This false perception is compounded by a Japanese culture historically steeped in specific expectations of how men and women should behave in public, where ‘behaving appropriately’ becomes a matter of social survival for women. Faced with these attempts to dissuade and silence her, Shiori Ito had to not only escape forced judicial silence, but also resist social pressure that could have led her to social suicide, forcing her into ostracism by all for daring to speak out.
The culture of shame in Japan questions the responsibility placed on victims, but this phenomenon is not isolated and can be found elsewhere, driven by conservative narratives that universally protect men while silencing women.
In this context, victims are often held to an excessive moral responsibility, as if their dignity depended on their ability to ‘behave’ or even excuse what they have suffered and conform to deeply patriarchal social norms, rather than on the recognition of the violence they have endured and the duty of justice.
Shiori, through the filmed capture of this quest, shows us with distinguished resilience that strength is not shouted: it is asserted. She was violated in her intimacy, but she refused to define herself by this violence.
She has chosen to live with her story without letting it erase her identity. In some excerpts, we see her standing tall and ready to speak, surrounded by a make-up artist and a hairdresser, expressing her right to exist beyond this story.
The small earrings, the carefully smoothed hairstyle, the subtle make-up, testify to her right to challenge what happened to her, without denying or despising the woman she is, but by honouring her existence and affirming her desire to love herself through subtle but very present signs. Her femininity is not performative, it is resilient.
What if the power you hold lives in your femininity? Yes, even in its most subtle form, because femininity is above all about seeing yourself and not forgetting who you are.
Sunshine Empowerment 
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