Japanese woman shatters culture of silence to pursue high-profile TV journalist accused of raping her

Media intern Shiori Ito waives anonymity to pursue case against famed broadcaster Noriyuki Yamaguchi after prosecutors drop investigation

Freelance Japanese journalist Shiori Ito (Rex Features)

It was a spring Friday night when one of Japan’s best-known television journalists invited Shiori Ito out for a drink. Her internship at a news service in Tokyo was ending, and she had enquired about another internship with his network.

They met at a bar in central Tokyo for grilled chicken and beer, then went to dinner. The last thing she remembers, she later told the police, was feeling dizzy and excusing herself to go to the restroom, where she passed out.

By the end of the night, she alleged, he had taken her back to his hotel room and raped her while she was unconscious.

The journalist, Noriyuki Yamaguchi, the Washington bureau chief of the Tokyo Broadcasting System at the time and a biographer of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, denied the charge and, after a two-month investigation, prosecutors dropped the case.

Then Ito decided to do something women in Japan almost never do: She spoke out.

In a news conference in May and a book published in October, she said the police had obtained hotel security camera footage that appeared to show Yamaguchi propping her up, unconscious, as they walked through the hotel lobby. The police also located and interviewed their taxi driver, who confirmed that she had passed out. Investigators told her they were going to arrest Yamaguchi, she said - but then suddenly backed off.

Elsewhere, her allegations might have caused an uproar. But here in Japan, they attracted only a smattering of attention.

As the United States reckons with an outpouring of sexual misconduct cases that have shaken Capitol Hill, Hollywood, Silicon Valley and the news media, Ito’s story is a stark example of how sexual assault remains a subject to be avoided in Japan, where few women report rape to the police and their complaints rarely result in arrests or prosecution when they do.

On paper, Japan boasts relatively low rates of sexual assault. In a survey conducted by the Cabinet Office of the central government in 2014, one in 15 women reported experiencing rape at some time in their lives, compared with one in five women who report having been raped in the United States.

But scholars say Japanese women are far less likely to describe nonconsensual sex as rape than women in the West. Japan’s rape laws make no mention of consent, date rape is essentially a foreign concept and education about sexual violence is minimal.

Instead, rape is often depicted in manga comics and pornography as an extension of sexual gratification, in a culture in which such material is often an important channel of sex education.

The police and courts tend to define rape narrowly, generally pursuing cases only when there are signs of both physical force and self-defence and discouraging complaints when either the assailant or victim has been drinking.

Last month, prosecutors in Yokohama dropped a case against six university students accused of sexually assaulting another student after forcing her to drink alcohol.

And even when rapists are prosecuted and convicted in Japan, they sometimes serve no prison time; about one in 10 receive only suspended sentences, according to Justice Ministry statistics.

This year, for example, two students at Chiba University near Tokyo convicted in the gang rape of an intoxicated woman were released with suspended sentences, though other defendants were sentenced to prison. Last fall, a Tokyo University student convicted in another group sexual assault was also given a suspended sentence.

“It’s quite recent that activists started to raise the ‘No Means No’ campaign,” said Mari Miura, a professor of political science at Sophia University in Tokyo. “So I think Japanese men get the benefit from this lack of consciousness about the meaning of consent.”

Of the women who reported experiencing rape in the Cabinet Office survey, more than two-thirds said they had never told anyone, not even a friend or family member. And barely 4 percent said they had gone to the police. By contrast, in the United States, about a third of rapes are reported to the police, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

“Prejudice against women is deep-rooted and severe, and people don’t consider the damage from sexual crimes seriously at all,” said Tomoe Yatagawa, a lecturer in gender law at Waseda University.

Ito, 28, who has filed a civil suit against Yamaguchi, agreed to discuss her case in detail to highlight the challenges faced by women who suffer sexual violence in Japan.

“I know if I didn’t talk about it, this horrible climate of sexual assault will never change,” she said.

Yamaguchi, 51, also agreed to speak for this article. He denied committing rape. “There was no sexual assault,” he said. “There was no criminal activity that night.”

Ito had met Yamaguchi twice while studying journalism in New York before their encounter on 3 April 2015.

When she contacted him again in Tokyo, he suggested that he might be able to help her find a job in his bureau, she said. He invited her for drinks and then dinner at Kiichi, a sushi restaurant in the trendy Ebisu neighbourhood.

To her surprise, they dined alone, following beer with sake. At some point, she felt dizzy, went to the bathroom, laid her head on the toilet tank and blacked out, she said.

When she woke, Ito said, she was underneath Yamaguchi in his hotel bed, naked and in pain.

Japanese law describes the crime of “quasi-rape” as sexual intercourse with a woman by “taking advantage of loss of consciousness or inability to resist.” In the United States, the law varies from state to state, with some defining the same crime as second-degree rape or sexual assault.

Ito said it was about 5am when she woke up. She said she wriggled out from under Yamaguchi and ran to the bathroom. When she came out, she said, “he tried to push me down to the bed, and he’s a man, and he was quite strong, and he pushed me down and I yelled at him.”

She said she demanded to know what had happened and whether he had used a condom. He told her to calm down, she said, and offered to buy her a morning-after pill. Instead, she got dressed and fled the hotel.

Yamaguchi acknowledged that “it was inappropriate” to take Ito to his room, but said, “It would have been inappropriate to leave her at the station or in the hotel lobby.”

He declined to describe what happened next, citing the advice of his lawyers. But in court documents filed in response to Ito’s civil suit, he said he undressed her to clean her up and laid her on one of the beds in his room. Later, he added, she woke and knelt by his bed to apologise.

Yamaguchi said in the documents that he urged her to return to bed, then sat on her bed and initiated sex. He said she was conscious and did not protest or resist.

But in emails that he exchanged with Ito after that night, he presented a slightly different account, writing that she had climbed into his bed.

“So it’s not the truth at all that I had sex with you while you were unconscious,” he said in a message 18 Apri 2015. “I was quite drunk, and an attractive woman like you came into my bed half-naked, and we ended up like that. I think we both should examine ourselves.”

In another email, Yamaguchi denied Ito’s allegation of rape and suggested that they consult lawyers. “Even if you insist it was quasi-rape, there is not a chance that you can win,” he wrote.

Ito said she rushed home to wash after leaving the hotel. She now regards that as a mistake. “I should have just gone to the police,” she said.

Her hesitation is typical. Many Japanese women who have been assaulted “blame themselves, saying, ‘Oh, it’s probably my fault,'” said Tamie Kaino, a professor emeritus of gender studies at Ochanomizu University.

The police officers she spoke to initially discouraged her from filing a complaint and expressed doubt about her story because she was not crying as she told it, she said. Some added that Yamaguchi’s status would make it difficult for her to pursue the case, she said.

But Ito said the police eventually took her seriously after she urged them to view the hotel security footage.

A two-month investigation followed, after which the lead detective called her in Berlin, where she was working on a freelance project, she said. He told her they were preparing to arrest Yamaguchi on the strength of the taxi driver’s testimony, the hotel security video and tests that found his DNA on one of her bras.

The detective said Yamaguchi would be apprehended at the airport 8 June 2015, after arriving in Tokyo on a flight from Washington, and he asked her to return to Japan to help with questioning, Ito said.

When that day came, though, the investigator called again. He told her that he was inside the airport but that a superior had just called him and ordered him not to make the arrest, Ito said.

“I asked him, ‘How is that possible?'” she said. “But he couldn’t answer my question.”

Ito declined to identify the investigator, saying she wanted to protect him. The Tokyo Metropolitan Police would not comment on whether plans to arrest Yamaguchi were scuttled. “We have conducted a necessary investigation in light of all laws and sent all documents and evidence to the Tokyo prosecutors’ office,” a spokesman said.

Not long after Ito went public with her allegations, a Japanese journalist, Atsushi Tanaka, confronted a top Tokyo police official about the case.

The official, Itaru Nakamura, a former aide to Abe’s chief Cabinet secretary, confirmed that investigators were prepared to arrest Yamaguchi - and that he had stopped them, Tanaka reported in Shukan Shincho, a weekly news magazine.

The allegations did not affect Yamaguchi’s position at the Tokyo Broadcasting System, but he resigned last year under pressure from the network after publishing an article that was seen as contentious. He continues to work as a freelance journalist in Japan.

Ito published a book about her experience in October. It has received only modest attention in Japan’s mainstream news media.

Isoko Mochizuki, one of the few journalists to investigate Ito’s allegations, said she faced resistance from male colleagues in her newsroom, some of whom dismissed the story because Ito had not gone to the hospital immediately.

“The press never covers sexual assault very much,” she said.

Ito said that was precisely why she wanted to speak out.

“I still feel like I have to be strong,” she said, “and just keep talking about why this is not OK.”

The New York Times