Introduction
Nominated for the 2025 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and screened in over thirty countries, Black Box Diaries is a powerful first-person documentary directed by Japanese filmmaker Shiori Ito. Based on her own experience of sexual violence, the film took eight years to complete. However, despite its international recognition, the documentary remains unreleased in Japan. This absence is itself telling, and underscores the film’s radical nature: it is not only a challenge to social norms, but to the structures of visibility and legitimacy in media and law. The case itself occurred in 2015, and in 2017, Ito held a press conference, becoming the first woman in Japan to publicly reveal her identity and image while filing a rape accusation. For two years, she sought justice through legal, institutional, and media channels. Sadly, Japan’s culture of silence and its deeply patriarchal power structures repeatedly blocked her efforts.
Turning away from institutions, Ito instead addressed the public, publishing a book and embarking on the long, painful journey of making this documentary. She described the process as a “super hardcore therapy session.”[1] As Cathy Caruth reminds us, “The story of trauma, then, as the narrative of a belated experience, far from telling of an escape from reality—the escape from a death, or from its referential force—rather attests to its endless impact on a life” (1996, p.7).
At the same time, as Alisa Lebow observes, “‘I’ is always social, always already in relation, and when it speaks, as these filmmakers do, in the first person, it may appear to be in the first person singular ‘I’ but ontologically speaking, it is always in effect, the first person plural ’we’” (2013, p.3). Ito’s act of voicing her trauma transforms what has long been silenced into a public dialogue—one that questions the complicity between judicial, cultural, and patriarchal systems. In doing so, the film exposes the structural violence and suppression that continue to shape the lived experiences of survivors. This paper aims to analyze Black Box Diaries as a central case study of how director Shiori Ito uses self-representational imagery, the tension between seeing and being seen, and a non-linear narrative structure to create a dialogic space between personal experience and structural conditions. Through a close reading of the film, the main focus is on three key aspects: the political practice of first-person filmmaking, the delayed representation of trauma, and the director’s use of cinematic action to confront a culture of silence and patriarchal institutional oppression.
Subjectivity, Resistance, and the Ethics of Exposure
In the context of documentary history, first-person filmmaking marks a significant departure from the expository mode that traditionally dominated the genre, becoming a tool of resistance. By choosing the form of a first-person documentary, Shiori Ito is not merely pointing a finger at a single perpetrator. Instead, she is exposing how an entire system enables the silencing of survivors and the concealment of truth. The fact that the accused holds a position of power, protected by political and law enforcement elites, further underscores that what Ito and many other survivors are up against is not an individual, but a deeply entrenched patriarchal structure. Black box diaries does not simply speak to its viewers—it addresses a society that treats silence and “propriety” as ethical imperatives. Through a constant shift between subject and object, Ito makes it impossible for the viewer to categorize her as either the “traditional victim” or the “improper woman.” Instead, she confronts the audience as a complex, active subject whose presence resists easy definition.
Her use of visual strategies embodies the political stance that “the personal is political.” Sexual violence—often treated in Japan as a private matter, a family shame, or a taboo—is here reframed as a public issue, one that demands collective recognition. As mentioned in the film, 70% of victims in Japan do not seek help from authorities; the fact that she is asked to recreate the assault using a doll of the correct size further reflects the institutional neglect and lack of support that victims face. Ito’s narrative does not just record a traumatic event—it builds a connection between personal pain and a society that actively avoids acknowledging it.
As Alisa Lebow notes, citing Michael Renov, “In the first-person film, the filmmaker’s subjectivity is not only brought back into frame, it permanently ruptures the illusion of objectivity so long maintained in documentary practice and reception” (2012, p.5). This kind of filmmaking reconfigures the ethics of non-fiction by placing the voice and experience of the filmmaker at the center of the narrative. The long-standing myth of documentary objectivity is dismantled; instead, the filmmaker’s position is made visible and political. The act of revealing the self is not narcissistic, but a form of critique—an intervention into collective silences and exclusions.
Ito’s face appears on screen early in the film, with her expression determined and anxious at the same time. She openly admits her fear of what is to come, but later affirms: “All I want is to talk about the truth.” In the first-person mode, the filmmaker is no longer just the one holding the camera, but becomes a visible subject within the image. Her body is both the one who gazes and the one who is gazed upon—seen in cellphone footage, by the camera of a friend, or in surveillance images. This is also, arguably, a self-portrait film. As Shearer West writes, “The viewer of a self-portrait also occupies a strange position of looking at a metaphorical mirror that reflects back not themselves but the artist who produced the portrait” (2004, p.165). The viewer’s position is constantly shifting—meanwhile, an outside observer and a witness to the filmmaker’s interiority. Ito’s background as a journalist adds a further complexity layer to it. She holds an unusual level of commitment to objectivity. In the film, she speaks to the audience: “A journalist’s job is to talk about the truth.”
At times, the film presents sequences devoid of human movement—empty cityscapes, corners of bedrooms, still objects, and so on. These seemingly neutral images offer moments of quiet distance, creating a formal sense of objectivity. But this is offset by her intense self-exposure: crying into the camera, confessing fears, acknowledging moments of emotional collapse. The viewer becomes drawn into a layered dialogue with the filmmaker—one that goes beyond watching, and enters the space of shared presence.
Ito’s trauma experience ultimately functions not only as a personal testimony but as a connective force, linking viewers to the broader social wound. As Cathy Caruth writes:
“But we can also read the address of the voice here, not as the story of the individual in relation to the events of his own past, but as the story of the way in which one’s own trauma is tied up with the trauma of another, the way in which trauma may lead, therefore, to the encounter with another, through the very possibility and surprise of listening to another’s wound.” (1996, p.8)
In this way, the true activism of Black Box Diaries does not lie in reconstructing the past event, but in continuously creating the conditions for seeing and listening. The film allows trauma not only to echo, but to persist, to remain unfinished, to form new ties. Following this, I would like to turn to examine how the film’s non-linear structure and visual strategies reflect the belatedness and unresolved temporality of trauma, transforming it from a past event into a present tense that has not yet—and may never be concluded.
Cherry Blossoms, Trauma and Duration
Oh, there are bodies buried beneath the cherry trees!
The vision that came out of nowhere, or the bodies that I could not have predicted in the least, has now become one with cherry trees for me, but no matter how much I shake my head I cannot separate them.
And now, taking the same liberty as those villagers spreading out their banquets under the trees, I feel like drinking beneath a cherry tree.
(Kajii, 1927 [2011])
Cherry blossoms, as the national flower of Japan, are among the most enduring cultural symbols in Japanese aesthetics, literature, and political imagination. Frequently appearing in poetry, painting, and cinema, they often carry contradictory associations: beauty and death, renewal and destruction, personal emotion and national ideology. This cultural ambivalence resurfaces in contemporary media, particularly in Black Box Diaries, where the motif of cherry blossoms gains new meaning in the context of sexual violence and repressed trauma.
In the film’s opening sequence, we see petals drifting along a small stream—a visual commonly associated with transience and beauty. Yet this scene is immediately overlaid with text typed by the director herself, referring to her experience of sexual assault. The juxtaposition of a national symbol of purity with a personal act of resistance against sexual violence creates a rupture. In this context, cherry blossoms no longer signify seasonal beauty, but become a cultural screen—one that obscures, suppresses, and paradoxically reactivates trauma. Thus, in Black Box Diaries, the cherry blossoms are not simply a background element, but a potent symbolic site where personal memory clashes with collective ideology.
Midway through the story, Ito participates in a gathering with fellow media professionals and shares the following:
“It must have been around this time, four years ago, when it happened. I realized I hadn’t seen cherry blossoms in four years. I had been living abroad, and I even asked my friends if we could go see them. But I was surprised by how anxious I felt. I realized that the incident had happened exactly when the cherry blossoms were in full bloom. Since then, I haven’t seen them again. That made me realize how memory can be triggered at any moment.”
From a psychoanalytic perspective, trauma unfolds through a three-stage structure: experience, interpretation, and repetition (Shen, 2004, pp. 42–55). In the initial stage, the subject cannot fully process or control the traumatic event. Later, the memory is re-encoded and interpreted, forming a second temporal layer. In the final stage, the subject must continually revisit, articulate, and reinterpret the trauma in order to ease anxiety and reduce the instability it causes. This three-layered temporality reveals the “aftereffect” and “delay” that defines trauma: though it seems to stem from a past event, trauma does not lead the subject back to the past. Instead, it persistently challenges existing interpretations and points toward a future that remains unseen.
To fully understand the value of Black Box Diaries, we must approach it from this temporal structure of trauma—not only asking how much of the past it recovers, or how many narrative gaps Ito fills in, but how the film is held within a state of delay. Typically, returning to the past in trauma narratives aims to allow the subject to “move on” and re-enter the present. But in Ito’s visual language, trauma is not a concluded incident, but a reality that continues to unfold. She repeatedly listens to audio recordings, films herself, and retells fragments in front of the camera—not to prove anything, but to expose the unfinished nature of traumatic narrative. She enters ruptures in memory, and returns again and again to moments that cannot be fully spoken. This repetition, duration, and fragmentation reflect what Cathy Caruth has called “not only a simple pathology but a fundamental enigma concerning the psyche’s relation to reality” (1996, p. 91). Duration is the temporal structure of trauma, and Ito chooses to live within it rather than overcome it.
This structure is also present in the film’s formal choices: the use of empty cityscapes, handheld and unstable shots, selfie videos, surveillance camera footage, and the disjunction between voice and image all immerse the viewer in Ito’s disoriented and suspended state. Her speech often falters, repeats, or collapses into silence, especially when interacting with the voice recorder. It is in these gaps—these echoes and breakdowns of language—that trauma appears on screen as unspoken, unfinished.
There are, broadly, two approaches to bearing witness to trauma. One treats trauma as an illness that can be healed by returning to the scene of the event and reconstructing it fully; the other is to live within the time of trauma itself—to inhabit a deliberately created space of delay that allows for new forms of meaning and resistance. From a psychoanalytic view, the latter is not about closure or recovery, but about enacting another kind of ethical witnessing. As Shen (2004) notes, the third stage of trauma involves repeated reinterpretation—a process that not only soothes anxiety, but also opens the possibility for intervention in reality.
In Black Box Diaries, this is not simply a question of whether Ito’s story can be heard. It is a question of why, even as the global #MeToo movement gained momentum, Japan remained largely silent. The film’s delayed narrative is not just a personal reconstruction of memory, but an ongoing struggle against systemic and cultural suppression. The duration becomes not a failure of storytelling, but a political mode of persistence.
Conclusion
Black Box Diaries showcases the power of first-person documentary to intervene in systems of silence and structural oppression. Shiori Ito takes apart the illusion of objectivity that has long dominated documentary practice by situating herself in the center of the narrative. Importantly, Ito does not position her trauma as a stable event that should be resolved, but as a lived and ongoing reality. Through fragmented narration, temporal duration, and visual disruption, the film makes visible the structure of trauma not as something to be “healed,” but as something that must be held, revisited, and shared. Black Box Diaries offers a potent example of how cinematic self-representation can both bear witness to individual pain and call for collective responsibility. Ito’s act of speaking, filming, and exposing offers a significant intervention: one that transforms personal testimony into public resistance and documentary filmmaking into a space of unfinished political possibility.
However, this analysis has its limitations. It focuses mainly on the representational and political strategies employed in the film, without fully exploring its reception, particularly within Japan, where the film remains officially unreleased. Future work could address audience responses, media discourse, with the gradual influence of the global # MeToo movement.
References
1. Ito, S. (2024). Shiori Ito on Black Box Diaries | BFI London Film Festival 2023. [video] BFI, Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XigroYj8Amo [Accessed 11 May 2025].
2. Caruth, C. (1996) Unclaimed experience : trauma, narrative, and history. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
3. Kajii, M. (1927). Beneath the Cherry Trees. Translated by G. Ruth, 2011. [online] All Wrongs Reversed. Available at: https://allwrongsreversed.net/2011/09/28/beneath-the-cherry-trees/ [Accessed 11 May 2025].
4. Shen, W. (2004). Deconstructing the Event and the Trauma of 9/11 ( Translated from Chinese by the author). Contemporary, (207), pp. 42–55.
5. West, S. (2004). Portraiture. 1st ed. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.
6. Lebow, A. (2012) . The cinema of me : the self and subjectivity in first person documentary. London: Wallflower Press.
