It’s not each day that one individual adjustments their total nation. It’s even rarer for that individual to be a information intern with no political connections. But that’s precisely what occurred to Shiori Itō, the topic and director of MTV’s new documentary, Black Box Diaries, due for launch in October.
For 5 years, the younger Japanese journalist documented her quest for justice after she was drugged and raped by Noriyuki Yamaguchi, a outstanding TV journalist and pal of Shinzô Abe, the then-prime minister of Japan. Although Itō had a mountain of proof on her aspect, the police claimed that her case in opposition to Yamaguchi was a dud. According to them, Itō’s assault existed inside a “black box,” rendering it untouchable to prosecution and invisible to the world at giant.
Amazingly, Itō saved up the struggle. She started rigorously archiving each second of her wrestle in opposition to Yamaguchi, assembling a patchwork of audio clips, surveillance movies, vlogs, and covert recordings about her assault. The result’s Black Box Diaries, a documentary that examines Itō’s real-life courtroom circumstances and confronts Japan’s shockingly draconian legal guidelines and social attitudes.
For this installment of Made in Frame, we sat down with the editor of Black Box Diaries, Ema Ryan Yamazaki. Yamazaki selected Premiere Pro and Frame.io to assist her sift by means of 5 years’ price of Itō’s collected footage to craft this powerhouse of a documentary. We’ll take a look at why she selected these platforms and the way Yamazaki needed to develop as an editor to carry Itō’s outstanding story to life.
The black field
Shiori Itō’s story started in 2015 when, as a 25-year-old intern at Thomson Reuters, she met Noriyuki Yamaguchi at a restaurant for what she thought could be a job interview. That evening ended with Itō blacking out and waking up in a resort room with Yamaguchi assaulting her.
The subsequent morning, Itō’s Sisyphean battle with the Japanese authorized system started. Her allegations of rape have been brushed apart. She was instructed that there was merely no technique to maintain Yamaguchi accountable. Her information colleagues additionally refused to print something destructive concerning the well-known reporter, fearing that his connection to Shinzô Abe would get them blacklisted from Japan’s press golf equipment.
But Yamaguchi clearly didn’t know who he was coping with. Instead of giving up, Itō was a brilliant investigator. She started to secretly document her conversations, even getting a police officer, codenamed Investigator A, to feed her details about her case. Itō additionally tracked down the taxi driver who dropped her off at Yamaguchi’s resort; he admitted that Itō was begging to be taken dwelling the entire trip. But not even Itō’s community of witnesses and supporters may stand as much as Yamaguchi’s highly effective political connections. When Investigator A bought faraway from her case, it appeared like the reality could be buried for good.
Born three days aside
Ema Ryan Yamazaki joined Black Box Diaries in 2020. Born in Japan to a British father and a Japanese mom, she grew up feeling like a little bit of an outsider.
“It didn’t matter if my Japanese was perfect,” Yamazaki tells me throughout a video name from her condominium in Tokyo. “I was only ever seen by some people as half-Japanese. That got frustrating as a young person. It was one of the reasons why I left.”
As a center schooler, Yamazaki determined she needed to turn into a filmmaker, and she or he finally left Japan to pursue a level at NYU Tisch. Upon graduating, she started her profession as an assistant editor, mentored by Peabody and Emmy Award-winning documentarian Sam Pollard. Her enhancing profession blossomed and shortly Yamazaki was enhancing for business legends like Marc Levin and writing/directing/producing her first function movie, Monkey Business.
Then, in 2017, Yamazaki determined that she needed to inform extra tales about Japan. She returned to Tokyo to direct Koshien: Japan’s Field of Dreams, a documentary a couple of highschool baseball group attempting to win Japan’s wildly fashionable nationwide championship.
Yamazaki continued working out and in of Tokyo, finally assembly Shiori Itō in 2019. Both ladies have been operating in comparable circles, making documentaries in Japan, they usually struck up knowledgeable friendship. They rapidly found they’d so much in frequent: they have been the identical age, born solely three days aside, and each had lived in New York City and later returned to work in Japan.
Yamazaki additionally admired Itō’s images. She employed Itō to work as a cinematographer on Temple Family, a brief documentary for NHK. That collaboration in the summertime and fall of 2020 allowed the 2 ladies’s relationship to develop. Afterwards, Itō felt comfy sufficient to method Yamazaki with a proposal: Would she need to work on a documentary about her case in opposition to Yamaguchi?
Hundreds of hours of footage
Yamazaki wasn’t the one individual Itō approached for Black Box Diaries. She additionally requested Yamazaki’s husband, Eric Nyari, to return aboard as a producer on the movie. By this time, Yamazaki was a seasoned director, with a number of movies and documentary collection underneath her belt. But even an skilled professional like Yamazaki was shocked when Itō handed over 5 years’ price of audio and video recordings.
“It was hundreds of hours of footage,” Yamazaki explains. “It took four or five months just to go through it all. A lot of it was audio-only, filmmaker friends filming Shiori, or iPhone videos that Shiori herself had recorded for protection.”
Yamazaki was surprised by a few of the footage. Clip by clip, she watched her pal endure the harrowing strategy of reporting her rapist. She listened as Itō described a humiliating investigation the place the police pressured her to recreate her assault with a dummy, all whereas a male officer snapped photographs. She additionally noticed Itō’s paranoia enhance from the fixed surveillance posted outdoors her dwelling. In one video, Itō’s solely police contact, Investigator A, drunkenly got here onto her as they have been discussing her case. In one other, Itō bravely chased down the police chief who had admitted to halting the arrest of her abuser. With a full digital camera crew at her aspect, Itō demanded an interview, which she was denied. Her investigation appeared to be falling aside on the seams.
The ten-hour reduce
After watching all of the footage and taking notes, Yamazaki started with a ten-hour reduce of her pal’s expertise. She put the case in chronological order utilizing Adobe Premiere Pro for its easy-to-use timeline features and its means to course of many alternative codecs directly.
When it involves enhancing, Yamazaki likes to maintain it easy. “Technically, I rely on my assistant a lot,” she says. “All I need is a timeline. Tools are great, but I just need a way to put the movie together.”
All I want is a timeline. Tools are nice, however I simply want a technique to put the film collectively.
Yamazaki and her Tokyo-based group additionally used Premiere’s Frame.io integration to evaluate and approve their VFX work, which was carried out in New York. Since many pictures in Black Box Diaries featured authorized paperwork, that info needed to be blurred out for privateness. Frame.io let Yamazaki rapidly and simply evaluate and approve that VFX work and the stabilization wanted to clean out the shakiness of a few of the lower-quality video codecs used within the movie.
“Using Frame.io to comment on the exact frame made the process very simple,” says Yamazaki. “That was a big help as we were dealing with a timezone difference and we had limited time to get the film finished.”
Levity and drama
To edit Black Box Diaries, Yamazaki says she needed to intimately relive what her pal went by means of. She describes Itō’s journey as “horrific, but sometimes surprisingly funny. That’s because Shiori is a funny person… You just can’t write some of this stuff.”
It was necessary for Yamazaki to point out all sides of Shiori, even her goofiest ones, so there’s a contact of absurdity in Black Box Diaries’ heaviness. In one scene, the documentary crew turns into satisfied that somebody has bugged Itō’s condominium. The producers buy a listening system detector and are shocked when it begins to go off, apparently detecting a microphone behind each door, window, and wall. Eventually, after a whole lot of operating round, they understand it’s only Itō’s lavalier mic setting the detector off.
“There were so many moments like that,” recollects Yamazaki. “We tried to take some of the funny scenes out because we didn’t want the humor to distract from the drama, but it didn’t work. It’s just a part of Shiori’s life. She deflects with humor, even if she’s feeling depressed or scared.”
Dear diary
While enhancing, Yamazaki encountered an fascinating downside: She was having problem navigating the angle of the movie. She didn’t need audiences to always query how Shiori Itō was directing the documentary whereas additionally being in it. How may she make it clear that Itō was each the director and the topic of Black Box Diaries?
It was a conundrum. The group experimented with a number of completely different concepts. At one level, Yamazaki says there was “an idea of Shiori swimming in the ocean, which was something she enjoyed doing. It was supposed to be a visual metaphor. We also tried some stop-motion scenes to express her inner thoughts, but they didn’t quite work.”
The reply got here with the thought of diaries. While enhancing, Yamazaki observed that Itō would all the time carry round a pocket book to jot down down her emotions. She remembers, “One day, we were going through her diaries and we realized they could be a device. It was amazing how often the words in her diaries, in her handwriting, would match what was happening on screen.”
But there was one other downside. Much of Black Box Diaries’ early footage was audio-only or shot in poor high quality, leaving the group with no visuals to accompany their sound and narration. The resolution got here from Itō herself. Using the diary aesthetic as a information, Itō started filming summary moments that reminded her of how she felt when she was writing. Yamazaki paired one audio-only cellphone name with Investigator A to summary pictures of the curtains and lights round Itō’s condominium, as a result of that’s what Itō remembered taking a look at when she took the decision. The result’s private, lovely, and extra evocative than any reenactment may ever be.
“Do we need a doctor on hand?”
The first reduce of Black Box Diaries took the group a yr to assemble and it taught Yamazaki so much about working with a director who was additionally her personal topic.
“I was learning all about Shiori,” Yamazaki tells me. “When she gets overwhelmed or stressed out, she takes a nap. I think that was a way of protecting herself so she could continue to function.”
But Yamazaki grew involved when she realized Itō couldn’t bear in mind filming a few of the footage. In one diary-style video, Itō tried to overdose on digital camera after apologizing to her dad and mom. Itō instructed Yamazaki that she didn’t bear in mind filming the scene or its aftermath, which brought on Yamazaki to wrestle with tips on how to present it to Shiori in a reduce.
Yamazaki questioned, “Do we need a doctor on hand? I just couldn’t imagine being Shiori and seeing this. It was so stressful. I knew that she liked to push herself, but I also knew there could be consequences later if she did too much.”
Working with Itō should have required a fragile contact. Viewers of Black Box Diaries can see how exhausting Shiori threw herself into fixing her case. When she started chasing leads, she hardly appeared to consider anything. Itō additionally didn’t seem to emotionally course of her assault or her repeated roadblocks to justice. What appeared like professionalism quickly grew to become Itō’s obvious try and wrench management out of one thing a lot greater and extra sophisticated than herself. Just like Yamazaki, viewers of Black Box Diaries could turn into apprehensive about Shiori’s well-being.
Thankfully, Yamazaki’s worst fears didn’t come true. Itō responded properly to the footage and went on direct from a spot of honesty and professionalism. “When we showed Black Box Diaries to the producers they said, ‘this is going to be an incredible film’.”
Four years later…
Editing Black Box Diaries took 4 years, with some massive breaks in between. Yamazaki went off to direct her personal movie, The Making of a Japanese, and Mariko Montpetit stepped in to fill her footwear. Itō and Montpetit explored other ways to precise Itō’s internal struggles and a few of these poetic concepts carried by means of to Yamazaki’s enhancing course of when she returned to the movie.
Also necessary to Black Box Diaries was consulting editor Maya Daisy Hawke. Hawke is a critically acclaimed editor in her personal proper, having reduce 2023’s Oscar-winning documentary Navalny. Hawke gave many rounds of suggestions because the movie took form and she or he joined Black Box Diaries for 5 intense days on the finish of the enhancing course of to get the doc into form.
“Maya was integral to getting us to the finish line,” says Yamazaki. “She gave us incredible insight on how to examine every shot and question its significance.”
Test screenings and suggestions
Editing a documentary like Black Box Diaries takes a whole lot of consideration. Yamazaki remembers how tough it was to tempo the movie. According to her, the primary cuts of Diaries had so many emotional moments that, by the climax, suggestions audiences have been just too drained to be moved by the movie. Yamazaki realized she had to determine methods to tug again on a few of Itō’s wonderful footage in order that the viewers’s emotional gas gauge wasn’t at zero in the course of the movie’s strongest moments.
“Nothing was easy or natural about this process,” Yamazaki remembers. She struggled for a bit to seek out the rhythm and tone that will carry the primary threads of Diaries collectively. There was the investigative aspect, Itō’s wrestle to return to phrases along with her state of affairs, and the development of Itō having to show inward and face herself. All three components would should be given equal weight for Diaries to work.
Nothing was straightforward or pure about this course of.
“The first half of the film is about Shiori investigating her own case,” Yamazaki says. “There’s a lot of action. She’s trying to get information, run down the police, and win over the investigator. Of course, she’s always the victim of what happened, but she’s also a journalist chasing a story. Then there’s a moment when everything hits her. She realizes that her whole investigation was a way to deflect from facing her inner self. And it’s not pretty. It’s really hard.”
Emotional mapping
Itō’s massive be aware for Yamazaki was, “There’s too much of me crying!” But Yamazaki appreciated her pal’s vulnerability, saying, “I think any emotion is appreciated. As an editor, I was thinking, ‘Oh, the subject is crying. That’s probably going to be a good moment in the film.’ And those moments each represent an emotional tier. What Shiori cries about in one scene is very different from what she cries about in another.”
“We had to map out her emotional ups and downs, which was a weird thing to do. It was strange to talk to a director, who was also the subject, and say, ‘I know you were down at that moment, but we’re going to cut it out because it’s too many downs. And over here, there are too many ups. We must consolidate so it feels like you only had one down and one up.’ It was a very weird thing to do.”
At first, Itō discovered it exhausting to consider her life as a group of scenes in a movie. Yamazaki felt protecting of her pal too and had Itō go away the enhancing room when she was engaged on a few of Diaries’ most delicate moments. But that didn’t final for lengthy. Eventually, Itō was in a position to watch Black Box Diaries time and again, and provides spectacular notes.
“We got to a point where Shiori could look at the heavy moments and say, ‘Let’s take a few seconds out of that,’” says Yamazaki. “It became a normal editing conversation. I think she did incredibly well. I could not imagine doing that myself.”
Shifting viewpoints
Yamazaki nonetheless has an advanced relationship along with her dwelling nation. As a baby, she was annoyed by the individuals who thought that her British heritage made her “not Japanese enough.” But escaping to New York City made her understand that she could have taken some issues about Japan as a right.
“There are things like people being on time,” Yamazaki explains with a smile. “There’s a general sense of decency in Japan. And the subway is clean. When I got to New York, I thought, ‘What is this?!’”
But engaged on Black Box Diaries appears to have modified Yamazaki’s opinion but once more. She says her eyes at the moment are open to a few of the worst features of Japanese society. She recollects one lady who instructed Itō that she was ashamed to share a gender along with her. And there may be additionally the truth that virtually no main Japanese information outlet reported on Itō’s history-making press convention when she first accused Yamaguchi again in 2017.
“It made me question our freedom of speech,” Yamazaki says. “I mean, Japan is not like Russia, right? I can say whatever I want here. But there is a system or a social construct in Japan that makes it incredibly difficult to speak up. Shiori had to go public that way because she couldn’t get other journalists to report her story. And of course, the perpetrator was so powerful.”
#MeToo
Yamazaki was transitioning from New York again to Japan simply because the MeToo motion was starting in America. When she arrived in Tokyo, she was shocked to see that almost all in Japan nonetheless appeared responsible ladies for his or her sexual assaults. And if a lady got here ahead to problem her assailant, she usually did so alone.
Still, many individuals cite Shiori Itō because the catalyst for Japan’s MeToo motion. Her 2017 memoir, Black Box, prompted a reckoning over gender-based violence in Japan. And Itō’s varied courtroom circumstances have additionally emboldened victims to return ahead in opposition to their abusers. Yamazaki believes this modification is a testomony to Itō’s power. And she believes that most individuals in Japan now agree that the nation ought to have handled her pal higher.
But the pervasive angle in Japan is to nonetheless sweep sexual assault underneath the rug. Yamazaki says that rape is “just not discussed. I think there must be a whole generation of women in this country who have experienced this and felt like they couldn’t talk about it. Now they’re mad. They’re saying, ‘Why do the younger women get to come forward when I couldn’t?’ I think it must come from them never being allowed to imagine that things could change.”
New case, outdated story
Yamazaki is presently following a brand new case in opposition to Hitoshi Matsumoto, who’s arguably probably the most well-known comic presently working in Japan. Earlier this yr, two ladies accused Matsumoto of forcing them into sexual actions at a non-public social gathering again in 2015. He has denied every part and is suing the editor-in-chief of Shukan Bunshun, the journal that revealed the allegations in opposition to him.
However, Yamazaki believes that Itō’s case has brought on a fantastic societal shift in Japan. She notes that there’s much less hostility round this new case, and folks typically appear extra open to believing the feminine victims. She additionally says that Matsumoto’s case has brought on renewed curiosity in Shiori’s story, and much more individuals will probably be speaking about it after MTV Docs formally releases Black Box Diaries later this October.
“I think Shirori has a lot more support now,” Yamazaki says. “She will be going down in the Japanese history books.”
You can comply with Black Box Diaries on Instagram to seek out competition screenings close to you. The doc may even be displaying at The Film Forum in NYC on October 25th.
