In the Public Eye

When Shiori Ito's sexual assault investigation was dropped. she de the camera on herself to find justice.

- KAYLA WEBLEY ADLER

"The typical expectation of a victimto be sad and weak, to hide and be embarrassedIhad a problem with this norm."

RARELY HAS A KARAOKE SESSION been so meaningful. Shiori Ito had just answered the final question at the audience talkback following the premiere of the documentary she made about her own sexual assault investigation, when she heard the opening chords of Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” fill the theater. Feeling euphoric after having shown her film to the world at the famed Sundance Film Festival, the Japanese director grabbed the mic and started singing. Audience members joined her onstage, and soon she was surrounded by a swarm of “dancing, crying, screaming” women. “We shared so much emotion,” Ito says of the impromptu karaoke session. “I’d never had that experience before, and I can’t forget it.”

It was a cathartic release, nearly a decade in the making. The story of how Ito got to that stage in Park City, Utah, begins in 2015, when she was a 25-year-old budding video journalist who was nearing the end of an internship at Reuters and seeking new opportunities. On a Friday night in April, Noriyuki Yamaguchi, one of Japan’s most prominent television journalists, then the Washington bureau chief of the Tokyo Broadcasting System (and biographer of then prime minister Shinzo Abe), invited Ito out to a restaurant in Tokyo after she had inquired about an internship at his network. (She had briefly met him during previous stints working in Washington, DC.)