Wonder and Kent discuss the documentary Black Box Diaries using the untimed birth chart of the film’s director, Shiori Ito. Emerging themes include an intrepid journalist investigating systemic cover-ups whilst also pursuing justice as a sexual abuse survivor who must face her abuser in court. Also covered: the millennial generation’s preoccupation with itemizing and deconstructing pain points in our cultures and how civil rights discourse in the 60’s paved the way for their critiques. Astrologically these themes link to Mars Neptune contacts as well as Mars Saturn, the 9th house, and the years between 1988 – 94 when Saturn was going through Capricorn and Aquarius along with the outer planets following the Uranus Pluto conjunction in the 60’s.
Distribution: Streaming on Paramount+ by Jan 2025, more info
Director: Shiori Ito
Run Time: 99 minutes
Astrological Data: Date of birth of Shiori Ito, May 17, 1989, Rodden Rating: X, Source: Wikipedia
Music Credit: spacedust by airtone
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:13.459] Kent Bye: Hello, my name is Kent Bye. Wonder Bright: And I'm Wonder Bright. Kent Bye: And welcome to the Story All the Way Down podcast, where we unpack the archetypal dynamics of stories. This season, we're focusing on Sundance 2024, specifically looking at 36 documentaries. This is the fifth of five of a section where we're calling deconstructing dominant power structures. So today we'll be diving into Black Box Diaries. which is a part of the World Cinema Documentary Competition, and the director and the chief protagonist in this film is Shiori Ito.
[00:00:42.956] Wonder Bright: So this is the synopsis from Sundance's website: Black Box Diaries. Journalist Shiori Ito embarks on a courageous investigation of her own sexual assault in an improbable attempt to prosecute her high-profile offender. Her quest becomes a landmark case in Japan, exposing the country's outdated judicial and societal systems. Black Box Diaries was born out of Ito's need to document her investigation, a response to the authorities' refusal to pursue her case in a meaningful manner. More importantly, it was a way to journal her fears and thoughts as she anticipated the backlash that followed. As the film's director, Ito accomplishes something remarkable. On one hand, Black Box Diaries has a raw and honest quality to it. It's a personal journey from the perspective of a victim piecing together the crime she experienced while pushing herself to the extreme. At the same time, it is an impressively crafted, concise piece of filmmaking guided by a strong sense of purpose and broken up by occasional moments of joy. Shiori Ito came forward to challenge her high-profile abuser despite knowing the risks. Her bravery meant hope for others and the prospect of real change to a broken system. And that synopsis comes to us by way of Sundance programmer Ania Trzebiatowska.
[00:02:09.730] Kent Bye: Yeah, this is a really remarkable achievement that this film was even made. And that it speaks to Shiori and her courage to actually step up against - what was said in the film is that the penal code in Japan that was enforcing sexual crimes was 110 years old in 2017. And so she was overcoming over a century's worth of patriarchal influence of
[00:02:35.239] Kent Bye: How much the culture was not supportive of survivors of sexual assaults and sexual violence Wonder Bright: not even not supportive - antagonistic - like, it’s the worst sort of misogynist patriarchal doctrine.
[00:02:48.536] Kent Bye: Yeah. Yeah. At the very beginning of the film, she's talking to her sister and her sister's pleading with her to please don't show your face as you come out and talk about what happened to you. It's a point where it’s part of the culture that you should be ashamed of these things. And she was really ahead of her time in terms of really trying to push forward the culture in a way that the story ended up ultimately landing right around the same time that the #MeToo movement took off in late 2017. And so she is in that same year of 2017, starting to come out and speak about it and write her book. And she is a journalist, and so she's actually objectively covering the story as if it were a journalist who is digging into a story. But she's also achieving these incredible amounts of personal vulnerability of showing herself in these moments of fear and terror of her own safety and livelihood as she was being followed and tracked and her life threatened. I mean, she's really going against the power structures here in terms of the status quo at the time. And it was just a remarkable turning point in history where she is just at the tip of the spear by being willing to be the first and at the point of literally launching the book right along the same time of when the #MeToo movement had taken off and was becoming a larger awareness that this was not just an isolated problem, but this was a pretty universal experience that women around the world have been experiencing so she was documenting it even before that moment and so it's just a remarkable journey in just the legal battle she had to go through to try to bring this to a court and to be countersued for defamation. I mean, it was just a really wild journey she had to go on, but just remarkable courage to even stand up and also the ability to tell her own story, to be the director and the chief protagonist. It's not an easy feat.
[00:04:50.154] Wonder Bright: No. And as I'm listening to you talk, I'm thinking obviously about the fight against power. It's almost like she is willing to be the lightning strike against the system of power, even if she ends up being impaled by it. You know, her sister, when she's pleading with her not to show her face in the beginning, isn't just doing it because she's concerned about the shame it will bring to her family. I feel like she's just terrified, like just legitimately frightened and frightened for Shiori, frightened for everybody in the family that's going to be impacted by this. And there are many scenes where Shiori breaks down that she has to do it. She's very clear that this is not only imperiling her, but it is going to imperil her family. And if my memory serves, her family actually has to move during the course of this incredible court battle because they're being threatened. And despite the fact that the sacrifice isn't just going to come from Shiori, it's going to affect her family as well, she perseveres, even though her family doesn't want her to. Ito is someone who is clearly driven to do this. At one point in the film, she says something about how she's realized how she hasn't been able to face herself in the process. Like she hasn't been able to unpack the harm that was actually done to her because her whole focus has been on fighting what has happened to her. And she's a journalist by trade. So it's like her whole job is to uncover the truth, is to not allow these facts and events to be buried in silence. And this is the thing - that it feels as if this is the thing that Ito feels will save her, even though it's coming at such cost. And despite all of this, at the heart of the film is this incredibly gentle, tender being who is so thoughtful. And, you know, as she made the film, obviously, she's been able to find some still points of reflection because the film itself is it is an act of reflection that she's doing. She's reflecting the culture back to itself. And I hope that she has since and has continued to be able to find the kind of healing that comes from that reflection internally. And the point that I want to make is that the film operates as a still place of reflection. It's part of the way that she's constructed it is through this very observational standpoint, which could be cool and cold and distant, but it isn't. We've talked before in a different episode about how Saturn, which has as its nature, cold and distant and isolated, also can bring about that state of contemplation. That's exactly what a monk would need or a nun would need in order to pursue a spiritual path is to be able to distill and reflect in a pure way. And I feel like that's what Ito is able to accomplish in this film. So despite the passion and the need to confront that is animating her fight, it's also imbued through this quality of stillness and reflection and calm observation to the point that it's almost uncanny. And it unpacks the systematic oppression of women in her culture in such a way that it becomes an undeniable litigation.
[00:08:49.944] Kent Bye: Yeah. And she's battling against the broader power structures. And I feel like the time period in which this is happening is at the same time as with the #MeToo movement, #BlackLivesMatter, a lot of the echoes from the 60s, that Uranus-Pluto conjunction that happened from 1960 to 1972, that rebellious spirit of liberation. And I'm just going to read a couple passages from Richard Tarnas. He says, “the 1960s have brought a decisive widespread empowerment of the emancipatory, innovative, destabilizing, revolutionary impulse that produced liberal reform or radical change in virtual every area of human activity, religion, politics, sexuality, civil rights, human rights, feminism, environmentalism, and the arts”. And so you see a lot of movements from the women's rights movement really took off in a way that it was a continuation of what was happening with the suffragette movement that had happened earlier, but also the civil rights movements and racial rights and also environmental justice and gay rights as well. And so during 2008 to 2020 was a first quarter square for Uranus and Pluto. So you see a lot of the continuation of The #MeToo movement, #BlackLivesMatter, we have the legalization of gay marriage. But Tarnas says that the feminist revolution during the Uranus Pluto conjunction of the 1960s, for example, was centered above all on achieving the empowerment and personal autonomy of women, political, economic, and sexual, as the means and measure for their liberation. So, there's a way in which this liberatory movement that was happening both in the 60s and during this time period of which Shiori Ito is coming forth and speaking out, is that there's this moment to have this paradigm shift for having reforms. And so, you have the reform of this penal code in Japan that was first changed in 2017, and it hadn't been changed for 110 years. So you see this moment for looking at some of these different legal structures, because a lot of what happens in this film is happening in the context of this ninth House law. She's fighting the law. And there was this really striking moment at the very end of the film where the perpetrator is asked after he's not won this court case that he was suing for, that he was being defamed, but he lost that suit. And so he's on the one hand saying, yes, I kind of regret some of the things that happened, but then he's sure to emphasize, but everything that I did was legal. And so there's something around the law that was enabling him to do this and that he wasn't doing anything illegal, but yet there needs to be a change to the law because what he's doing is a violation of human rights.
[00:11:27.602] Wonder Bright: I mean, what he's doing, by the way, is drugging her and then carrying her protesting out of a taxi cab and into his hotel room.
[00:11:36.706] Kent Bye: Yeah.
[00:11:37.066] Wonder Bright: Where he sexually assaults her.
[00:11:39.387] Kent Bye: Yeah.
[00:11:39.887] Wonder Bright: But that was actually legal. I mean, he's not incorrect. That was legal under Japan's law. So when Shiori Ito went after him, she had to change the law in order for her to get any justice.
[00:11:55.731] Kent Bye: Yeah, and this man is pretty high up in terms of the news ecosystem and actually wrote a biography about the prime minister of Japan. And so there was another dimension of power where the mechanisms of power were actually working through the police, the enforcers of the law, these 10,000 authority institutions that are then calling off the investigation, calling off the arrest and basically trying to bury this as a story. It's called The Black Box Diaries because what happens between people in the case of a sexual assault, it's basically he said, she said. There's oftentimes not a lot of empirical evidence to prove one way or another that was referred to as this black box. There's no way to go through this black box. So, that black box nature of sexual assault had meant that for many millennia, that this type of sexual violence has been perpetrated, but yet she's standing up and saying, this isn't right. And then each step of the way, she's documenting all of these secret conversations that she's having with the investigators. As a journalist, she's trying to not only find the truth of what's happening, but also to document what happens at each step of the way to someone like her, who is so clearly been drugged and not under the capacity to be able to consent, but under Japan's law, that was not the threshold under which that they were able to discern when sexual violence was happening. And so she has to stand up in the face of a culture that is almost totally opposed to her up until the point where you have a broad global movement that's happening with the #MeToo movement that then shifts the broader context. And then she's right at that forefront of being the leader of the #MeToo movement within the context of Japan.
[00:13:31.996] Wonder Bright: Yeah. And I just want to give a shout out to the astrological signature of her generation, millennials born between 1988 and 94, who all have a feature of their chart in that Saturn is in either Capricorn or Aquarius at the same time that we have the outer planets Neptune and Uranus going through Capricorn and Aquarius. And it's a feature of this generation that it has fallen to them and they have risen to the challenge. They created it for themselves to name all of the ways in which we have created outsiders in our culture and through our structures. So you can see the need for understanding and analyzing structure through Saturn in the signs that it rules of Capricorn and Aquarius. And you can see the way that they turn their attention to those of us who are labeled as being outsiders, whether it's because we're black or we're indigenous or we're queer or we're women, in whatever way it is that the mainstream settler, colonialist, patriarchal, capitalist culture inscribe certain bodies as being acceptable and other bodies as not being acceptable. This generation has been able to identify with minutae all the ways in which that doesn't work for them and doesn't work for our culture at large. And I just really love that. I really love that generation. People who are born in that period of time end up being some of my very favorite clients. I just feel like they have an ability to see into the structures of our culture and understand the ways in which we label certain things as being aberrant or unacceptable actually doesn't work for anybody. And so the way that we are learning culturally, globally now to identify those things, I feel like we owe a real debt of gratitude to millennials. I just I really appreciate that. In the case of Shiori Ito's chart specifically, we don't have a time of birth for her, but we do know that she was born May 17th, 1989. That means that she was born during a Saturn-Neptune conjunction. That's a very close conjunction at that time of the year. And significantly, Mars was transiting at 11 degrees Cancer, opposing that conjunction very, very closely. So, anybody who is literate with astrological symbols will recognize the Mars and Saturn-Neptune signatures that were inherent in the way that I described both Shiori's ability to fight passionately / Mars, and yet to remain a really cool, clear, observational, cogent description of the structure that she was fighting against, which would be Saturn in Capricorn conjunct Neptune. She has a real ability to actually navigate that terrain. And to be able to speak to both the passion and the fury that she is experiencing and at the same time to really be able to describe in clear detail what the structure is that she's opposing and why it does not work. So I would love to know where in her chart that falls and how it's manifesting, but we don't need to in order to be the beneficiaries of the vision that comes uniquely through her that that signature describes.
[00:17:18.874] Kent Bye: Yeah, and looking at this story, it's very clear that one of the significations that I have is Mars and the courage and the ability to fight. And with that Mars opposite this outer planet transit of Saturn Neptune, Saturn representing the boundaries and structures. And a lot of times the larger patriarchy and institutions and conservative impulses of our cultures with Neptune, which tends to be more diffuse and confusing and break down some of those institutions of control. but in a way that can be disillusioning and have a lot of deception and lies. And so, there's a couple other films that we'll be diving into, both the Lollapalooza, which is happening right around that conjunction between Uranus and Neptune that is really an epoch of the birth of the World Wide Web and all these cultural revolutions that are happening at that same time. But also, Ibelin, which is another story that gets into a little bit more ways that Saturn-Neptune tie into different virtual worlds. But in this case, it's really diving into a part of a character that is willing to stand up and fight against institutions and structures of power and injustice where I really see that that Mars opposite that Saturn Neptune. And also you can look into the topics or domains of human experience of the houses where the 1st House is the self and the 7th House is the other. And so there's an oppositional open enemy that's happening in the context of this piece where there's a lot of going to battle and going to war against somebody over the wall. So there's an oppositional nature to the story where there's a protagonist and an antagonist, the survivor and the perpetrator that is trying to find justice through the mechanism of the law, but also a lot of the 9th House expression of telling the story through journalism and trying to present the facts as objectively as you can, while also being emotionally present and vulnerable to share her own personal experiences that we get to see a lot more in this movie that I'm sure that as this was unfolding in real time, there was a lot of these moments that were likely behind the scenes and behind closed doors, but this really shows the impact for trying to really fight against the culture when all the odds are against you at the beginning, but by the end, the broader cultural time had turned to the point where she was really at the right place in the right time to tell this story and to be that person who was willing to get up and fight.
[00:19:41.161] Wonder Bright: Yeah, I don't even know if, like, she's willing. I just don't think she felt she had a choice. It's almost like she just is compelled in a way that is really hard to watch at times. It's clear that doing this came at real cost to her. At one point in the film, it's clear that she is narrowly saved after a suicide attempt. And she doesn't reveal too much about what's happening with her family or what kind of support she has or does not have. And I'm not comfortable commenting on Japanese culture or socialization, because as an American Westerner, I can't trust my own read on it. And the way she presents generally is she's smiling and she's just very light and she has this very almost ethereal quality about her. And she's nodding and she's smiling and she's talking about terrible things, you know. And yet there is this sort of default, delicate, feminine, very polite demeanor that, you know, this fight has to come through in some way. And I don't know how much it must cost to fight for something like this when it clearly comes at the cost of honor to her family and the cost of her reputation in ways that I suspect mean something in Japanese culture that I can only have a glimmer of an understanding of, but it seems immense.
[00:21:32.810] Kent Bye: Hmm. Yeah. There's a moment when there’s a day of judgment at the courts and a lot of cameras and her mother's interviewed. And still, even at that point, she says, we really didn't want her to come out. So there's a whole 12th House exile that's happening throughout the course of this as well, because she's not only exiled from the culture, but also her family, even her family is not quite sure up to the very end that this is the right thing that she should be doing.
[00:22:00.532] Wonder Bright: And we don't really know if that's been resolved. Truly. There was a moment in the Q&A where Ito says something that I just thought was so - it was really a powerful statement. It was an answer to a question from the audience that I couldn't hear and I'm not sure was transcribed. But Ito makes it very clear that she isn't saying that her need to fight was how anyone else should do this. She says that there are many ways of surviving and sometimes survival means silence. But for her, it was the opposite.
[00:22:46.192] Kent Bye: Whew. Yeah. Yeah, that's really powerful. And it's really clear when you watch the film. Like you said, she's compelled to do that.
[00:22:56.536] Wonder Bright: She has to, even though it's costing her.
[00:23:01.418] Kent Bye: Yeah, I guess when we think about this film, then who would you prescribe Black Box Diaries to?
[00:23:13.399] Wonder Bright: Well, I would prescribe it for any of my beautiful, precious millennials, especially those born between 1988 and 1994, who have felt themselves pushing their culture through their families, through their communities, through the broader systems that they have been at the mercy of, to find their fellow citizens in that realm. And I would prescribe this for anyone who's loved anyone from that era and anyone who's benefited from the ways in which that generation has been able to show us the cost that comes from living in a body that the mainstream culture does not recognize as feeling pain and therefore can just be summarily disposed of or used in whatever way suits our fancy.
[00:24:21.550] Kent Bye: Hmm. Yeah. And when I think about what I'm bearing witness to, I think for me, the courage of Shiori Ito to stand up and to fight against all odds and to take a stand, not only for her own healing, but for the future generations. She's representing a sea change of the culture of really deconstructing the dominant power structures. And you see what she has to go through in that process, all the stuff behind the scenes and probably even more stuff that we can't see that is either impossible to document or beyond the scope of a film. She wrote a book about it that came out, like I said, right around the time when the #MeToo movement was really taking off. And with this film coming out now, telling even more of that story. Hopefully being able to show more context for people who are still resistant to some of the changes that very clearly have needed to happen and are starting to happen, but I'm sure there's always more yet to be done as always within the context of sexual assault and sexual violence.
[00:25:29.011] Wonder Bright: Yes. I also want to bear witness to Shiori Ito and her bravery and her survival and the way in which she was willing to sacrifice whatever it took for her to survive so that others might as well. Thank you, Shiori.
[00:25:53.567] Kent Bye: For sure. And yeah, that's all that we have for today. And I just wanted to thank you for listening to the Story All the Way Down podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends and consider signing up for our newsletter at storyallthewaydown.com. Thanks for listening. Wonder Bright: Thank you.
