Shiori Ito told the police
she had been raped by Noriyuki Yamaguchi, then the Washington bureau
chief for the Tokyo Broadcasting System and a biographer of Prime
Minister Shinzo Abe.
Credit
Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York Times
TOKYO
— 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 inquired
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 Ms. 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
Mr. 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 Mr. 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.
Continue reading the main story
As the United States reckons with an outpouring of sexual misconduct cases that have shaken Capitol Hill, Hollywood, Silicon Valley and the news media,
Ms. 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 when they do, their complaints rarely result in arrests or
prosecution.
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-defense
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.
Ms.
Ito, 28, who has filed a civil suit against Mr. 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.
Mr.
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.”
‘Not a Chance’
Ms. Ito had met Mr. Yamaguchi twice while studying journalism in New York before their encounter on April 3, 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
neighborhood.
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, Ms. Ito said, she was underneath Mr. 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.
The
police later located a taxi driver who recalled picking up Ms. Ito and
Mr. Yamaguchi and taking them to the nearby Sheraton Miyako Hotel, where
Mr. Yamaguchi was staying.
The
driver said Ms. Ito was conscious at first and asked to be taken to a
subway station, according to a transcript of an interview with the
driver. Mr. Yamaguchi, however, instructed him to take them to his
hotel.
The
driver recalled Mr. Yamaguchi saying that they had more work to
discuss. He also said Mr. Yamaguchi might have said something like, “I
won’t do anything.”
When
they pulled up to the hotel, the driver said, Ms. Ito had “gone silent”
for about five minutes and he discovered that she had vomited in the
back seat.
“The
man tried to move her over toward the door, but she did not move,” the
driver said, according to the transcript. “So he got off first and put
his bags on the ground, and he slid his shoulder under her arm and tried
to pull her out of the car. It looked to me like she was unable to walk
on her own.”
Ms.
Ito also appears incapacitated in hotel security camera footage
obtained by the police. In pictures from the footage seen by The New
York Times, Mr. Yamaguchi is propping her up as they move through the
lobby around 11:20 p.m.
Ms.
Ito said it was about 5 a.m. when she woke up. She said she wriggled
out from under Mr. 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.
Ms. Ito believes she was drugged, she said, but there is no evidence to support her suspicion.
Mr.
Yamaguchi said she had simply drunk too much. “At the restaurant, she
drank so quickly, and in fact I asked her, ‘Are you all right?’” he
said. “But she said, ‘I’m quite strong and I’m thirsty.’”
He said: “She’s not a child. If she could have controlled herself, then nothing would have happened.”
Mr.
Yamaguchi said he had brought her to his hotel because he was worried
that she would not make it home. He had to rush back to his room, he
said, to meet a deadline in Washington.
Mr.
Yamaguchi acknowledged that “it was inappropriate” to take Ms. 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 Ms. 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
apologize.
Mr.
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 Ms. 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 on April 18, 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, Mr. Yamaguchi denied Ms. 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.
When
asked about the emails, Mr. Yamaguchi said a full record of his
conversations and correspondence with Ms. Ito would demonstrate that he
had “had no intention” of using his position to seduce her.
“I am the one who was caused trouble by her,” he added.
Shame and Hesitation
Ms.
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.
Hisako
Tanabe, a rape counselor at the Sexual Assault Relief Center in Tokyo,
said that even women who call their hotline and are advised to go to the
police often refuse, because they do not expect the police to believe
them.
“They think they will be told they did something wrong,” she said.
Ms.
Ito said she felt ashamed and considered keeping quiet too, wondering
if tolerating such treatment was necessary to succeed in Japan’s
male-dominated media industry. But she decided to go to the police five
days after the encounter.
“If I don’t face the truth,” she recalled thinking, “I think I won’t be able to work as a journalist.”
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 Mr. Yamaguchi’s status would
make it difficult for her to pursue the case, she said.
But Ms. 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 Mr. 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 Mr. Yamaguchi would be apprehended at the airport on
June 8, 2015, after arriving in Tokyo on a flight from Washington, and
he asked her to return to Japan to help with questioning, Ms. 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, Ms. Ito said.
“I asked him, ‘How is that possible?’” she said. “But he couldn’t answer my question.”
Ms.
Ito declined to identify the investigator, saying she wanted to protect
him. The Tokyo Metropolitan Police would not comment on whether plans
to arrest Mr. 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.
‘I Have to Be Strong’
In
2016, the most recent year for which government statistics are
available, the police confirmed 989 cases of rape in Japan, or about 1.5
cases for every 100,000 women. By comparison, there were 114,730 cases of rape in the United States, according to F.B.I. statistics, or about 41 cases per 100,000 residents, both male and female.
Scholars
say the disparity is less about actual crime rates than a reflection of
underreporting by victims and the attitudes of the police and
prosecutors in Japan.
Over the summer, Parliament passed the first changes to Japan’s sex crime laws
in 110 years, expanding the definition of rape to include oral and anal
sex and including men as potential victims. Lawmakers also lengthened
minimum sentences. But the law still does not mention consent, and
judges can still suspend sentences.
And
despite the recent cases, there is still little education about sexual
violence at universities. At Chiba, a course for new students refers to
the recent gang rape as an “unfortunate case” and only vaguely urges
students not to commit crimes.
In
Ms. Ito’s case, there is also a question of whether Mr. Yamaguchi
received favorable treatment because of his connection to the prime
minister.
Not
long after Ms. 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 Mr. Abe’s chief cabinet
secretary, confirmed that investigators were prepared to arrest Mr.
Yamaguchi — and that he had stopped them, Mr. Tanaka reported in Shukan
Shincho, a weekly newsmagazine.
The
allegations did not affect Mr. 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.
Ms.
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 Ms. Ito’s
allegations, said she faced resistance from male colleagues in her
newsroom, some of whom dismissed the story because Ms. Ito had not gone
to the hospital immediately.
“The press never covers sexual assault very much,” she said.
Ms. 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 O.K.”
Hisako Ueno contributed reporting.
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