Last year, the Japanese film "Godzilla 1.0" was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects and won the award. Director Takashi Yamazaki and other main creators stood on the award stage together, becoming the focus of attention of Japanese media and Japanese people. Looking back two years, "Drive My Car" directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi received four Oscar nominations and eventually won the Best International Film Award, which also sparked a lot of discussion in Japan.

This year, there is actually another Japanese film that received an important Oscar nomination, but the attention it received in Japan is completely incomparable to the above two works. That is "Black Box Diary", which was nominated for the Best Documentary Feature. Recently, many media outlets have interviewed the film's director, Shiori Ito, to unravel the mystery behind it.

Black Box Diaries poster

In fact, since its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival at the beginning of last year, Black Box Diary has been officially released and screened in nearly 60 countries and regions around the world. During the Pingyao Film Festival last year, Shiori Ito also brought the film to communicate closely with Chinese audiences. However, in Japan, no theater has publicly screened this work so far. In an interview with the media, Shiori Ito said helplessly, "We have been trying to find a way to bring this film to Japan for screening. We originally thought that the Oscar nomination would give us a lot of help, but it turned out to be a counter-force. To this day, we still haven't found a Japanese theater willing to distribute or screen it."

This dilemma has also attracted sympathy from overseas audiences. In France, someone organized an online signature petition, hoping to create enough public opinion to help "Black Box Diary" be officially released in Japan. "Faced with a stubborn system that wants to suppress voices of resistance like hers, Ito Shiori stood up and challenged the entrenched system alone with extraordinary resilience. Now, she needs our help to help her take this last step: bring her story home." The petition is written in French, English and Japanese, and currently only about 5,000 people have signed to express their support. "Every signature brings us one step closer to the release of "Black Box Diary" in Japan. Every voice will help convince Japanese distributors and media to support this vital work." The petition reads.

Stills from Black Box Diary

"Black Box Diary" tells the personal experience of former Japanese journalist Shiori Ito. In 2015, while interning at Thomson Reuters, she was invited to attend a supposedly business gathering, along with Yamaguchi Noriyuki, a well-known Japanese TV journalist who had close ties with then-Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. During dinner, Ito was drunk and then taken to the Tokyo Sheraton Hotel where Yamaguchi was staying. There, Ito, who had lost her ability to act, was raped by him.

As revealed in Black Box Diary, the Japanese police were initially unwilling to investigate the case, arguing that Japan's century-long rape laws required evidence of violent sexual assault to investigate and prosecute. For this reason, Ito was forced to conduct her own investigation. In this way, she obtained the surveillance video of the Sheraton Hotel, which showed that when the two arrived at the hotel, Yamaguchi forcibly pulled her out of the car, then put his arm around Ito's shoulders and pushed her into the building while Ito struggled to stand.

Shiori Ito told the reporter that it was very difficult to persuade the hotel to release the video. "Because the hotel did not want to be the party that leaked the privacy of customers, they refused to release the video. In the end, I spent a lot of effort to finally manage to obtain the video, but they asked me to pay about $4,000 specifically for mosaicing the face of the person on the screen."

According to the film's producer Eric Nyari, it was this surveillance footage that ultimately became the biggest obstacle to the film's release in Japan. "Compared to the United States, Japanese cinema and theater operators are more afraid of taking risks, and are indeed more likely to be sued and get into trouble," Nyari told reporters. "Many cinemas and theater chains themselves belong to large conglomerates, or have inextricable ties with them, and the related hotels are also closely related to the conglomerates. Therefore, whether "Black Box Diary" can be released and screened has become a particularly sensitive case."

"But I think the distributors are more concerned about the voices of the Japanese people than the legal issues," added Ito Shiori. In May 2017, she held a press conference to make public her rape accusations. This highly unusual decision won her support from some politicians in Japan at the time, but it set off a wave of abuse and criticism on social media, with many netizens dismissing her claims. However, Hanna Aqvilin, a documentary producer in London, happened to see her press conference on the news and contacted her. Aqvilin then proposed the possibility of co-producing a documentary and suggested that Ito leave Japan as soon as possible.

“I felt like she couldn’t stay there, and if she didn’t have a safe place to sit and think about how to tell this story, the film wouldn’t be made,” Aquilin recalls. “Looking back now, I was naive because I had no idea what kind of threats she was facing. It wasn’t until later that I really realized that she had no support, no legal aid, not enough support from family and friends, and why everyone was so scared of this matter and what would happen to them if it got out of hand.”

Ito said that for the past year, all her assets were packed into a carry-on suitcase. She took it with her wherever she went, and it contained a comfortable yoga mat and a cooking pot. She told the media that due to the case itself and the negative attention caused by the documentary, she felt that she might not be able to return to Japan to live in the future. "I traveled around for a year, visited different cities, saw how documentary filmmakers in various places lived and worked, and saw which places were suitable for living."

Efforts to release Black Box Diary in Japan are still ongoing. Producer Eric Nyari said, "We still hope that there will be brave Japanese distributors and brave theaters that will come forward. I hope that it will not just be a small art theater, but a courageous Japanese theater chain that will cooperate with us. In this way, we can carry out a large-scale release as originally planned."

"For me, being nominated for an Oscar is a great thing and we are all grateful, but personally, my real goal is to distribute the film in Japan, which is more important than anything else, even more important than winning an Oscar," Ito said.