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Black Box Diaries Documentary Impact (Photo Credit – Instagram)

Shiori Itō is a journalist who won rave accolades at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival for her documentary film Black Box Diaries. The documentary covers the journalist’s journey of facing sexual assault and its subsequent investigation case in Japan.

Black Box Diaries follows Shiori Itō’s journey as she rehashes her sexual assault case. She was sexually abused by Noriyuki Yamaguchi, who was the Washington D.C. Bureau chief of the Tokyo Broadcasting System. He was also well-acquainted with the late Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

The incident dates back to 2015 when Shiori Itō was an intern at Thomas Reuters. She was invited to a business get-together, and after that event, Yamaguchi took an inebriated Itō to his hotel, The Sheraton in Tokyo, and allegedly sexually assaulted her. The police were reluctant to investigate the case, citing age-old laws in Japan that...

Shiori Itō’s directorial debut, Black Box Diaries, has won acclaim around the world since its debut at last year’s Sundance Film Festival, recently earning an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary Feature. But there’s one place it hasn’t been seen: in the director’s native Japan.

The film, distributed in 58 countries globally and by MTV Documentary Films in the U.S., tells a first-person story of Itō’s attempt to seek justice and accountability after she was sexually assaulted by a prominent Japanese journalist.

“We’ve been struggling to bring the film to Japan, and we hoped the [Oscar] nomination can get us through,” Itō told us in Berlin before she headed to London for the BAFTAs over the weekend, where Black Box Diaries was nominated for Best Documentary. “But instead, the nomination created another backfire, pushback, and we still don’t have distribution or theaters to do it yet.

At the IDA Documentary Awards in Los Angeles on Thursday night, Japanese journalist-turned-director Shiori Itō will receive the Emerging Filmmaker Award, recognizing the incredible reception for her directorial debut Black Box Diaries. It’s the deeply personal story of Itō’s attempt to seek justice and accountability after she became the victim of a sexual assault, a public campaign of many years that ultimately led to changes in Japanese law.

The film, which has emerged as a strong Oscar contender, scored IDA Awards nominations this year in three additional categories including Best Documentary Feature and Best Director. Itō joins Deadline’s Doc Talk podcast to share insights on making the film, winner of awards at Cph:Dox in Copenhagen, the San Francisco International Film Festival, Seattle International Film Festival, Zurich Film Festival and many others.

The director explains why the strictures of Japanese culture and norms of politeness embedded in...

When A.A. Milne's 1926 children's novel "Winnie-the-Pooh" finally entered the public domain in 2022, filmmaker Rhys Frake-Waterfield was waiting in the wings. For many decades, Winnie-the-Pooh was owned by Disney, and the corporate megalith had always been protective about its property. Pooh was a gentle and whimsical extension of the Disney brand. When Disney lost exclusive rights, Frake-Waterfield elected to shove his thumb in Disney's eye and make "Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey," an incredibly cheap and horrendously bad slasher movie wherein everyone's favorite silly-old-bear was reimagined as an eight-foot murdering lummox.

Although "Blood and Honey" is a terrible movie, curious audiences attended out of morbid curiosity, and the film ended up grossing $7.7 million on a paltry $100,000 budget. Its success inspired Frake-Waterfields to not only make "Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 2," but also to announce a whole spate of other public domain childhood classics reinterpreted as cheap slasher movies. If all goes to plan,...

There’s a scene in Shiori Ito’s searing documentary Black Box Diaries, in which the director, who is also the film’s subject, tells a swarm of reporters about trying to press criminal charges against her rapist. Like many sexual violence survivors forced into this ritual of public re-litigation, she is a model of what society has come to expect of courageous women. Her face betrays no emotion and she is dressed in the chaste uniform of the aggrieved: delicate earrings (Ito opts for pearls), a conservatively tailored blouse (a black button down here), and wearing little to no makeup (faint signs of blush and a single stroke of eyeliner).

Ito’s voice remains calm as she recounts the police’s initial refusal to accept her victim’s report and their arsenal of excuses: Sex crimes were difficult to investigate, they said; her rapist, Noriyuki Yamaguchi, the former Washington Bureau...

Shiori Ito’s Black Box Diaries is a film the Japanese journalist should never have had to make. Based on her international bestseller, the Sundance-premiering doc is a dogged investigation into a rape perpetrated by another Japanese journalist, Noriyuki Yamaguchi, a longtime friend of the late former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, whose biography the offender penned as well. It’s also a somewhat surreal journey, given that the brave survivor in the purposely stalled case is Ito herself. Through an engaging mix of secret recordings, vérité shooting and confessional video, we’re invited along on an increasingly maddening odyssey through the shockingly antiquated Japanese […]

The post “A Deep Dive Into My Trauma”: Shiori Ito on Black Box Diaries first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Shiori Ito’s Black Box Diaries is a film the Japanese journalist should never have had to make. Based on her international bestseller, the Sundance-premiering doc is a dogged investigation into a rape perpetrated by another Japanese journalist, Noriyuki Yamaguchi, a longtime friend of the late former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, whose biography the offender penned as well. It’s also a somewhat surreal journey, given that the brave survivor in the purposely stalled case is Ito herself. Through an engaging mix of secret recordings, vérité shooting and confessional video, we’re invited along on an increasingly maddening odyssey through the shockingly antiquated Japanese […]

The post “A Deep Dive Into My Trauma”: Shiori Ito on Black Box Diaries first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

A young journalist documents her fight to bring her assailant to justice in one of the most powerful documentaries of the year. Here’s our Black Box Diaries review.

As Black Box Diaries opens, CCTV footage shows a man dragging a semi-conscious woman from a car into a hotel. The car is a taxi; the driver does nothing. The hotel is high-end; a man holds the door open for them. The woman is the film’s director, Shiori Itō; in 2015, she was a trainee journalist seeking career advice from Noriyuki Yamaguchi, the Washington bureau chief of the Tokyo Broadcasting System and a friend of then–prime minister Shinzo Abe. Yamaguchi drugged her, took her into the hotel, and raped her.

In a country whose sexual assault legislation was written more than a century earlier, and with an age of consent as low as 13 years old, the #MeToo movement would prove,...

Japan is looking to preserve its largest cultural export -- anime and manga -- and is now in talks with some of the industry's most prolific creators to explore how to achieve just that. The Agency for Cultural Affairs recently sat down with Hideaki Anno, the famed creator of Neon Genesis Evangelion, to find a path forward to preservation.

While post-war Japan became known for its cost-effective automobiles and innovative technology, its contemporary image has been shaped by anime and manga. While not the first of its kind, the global success of Osamu Tezukas Astro Boy (also known as Mighty Atom) set off a chain of events that culminated in former U.S. president Barack Obama thanking then-Prime Minister of Japan Shinzo Abe for the countrys cultural contributions. This also aided in shaping what many current anime fans view as the common '90s American childhood experience.

Related Evangelion's...

After reporting a high-profile journalist for sexual assault, Ito was championed and vilified. She relives that night and the aftermath in her documentary Black Box Diaries

When Shiori Ito arranged to meet Noriyuki Yamaguchi for dinner at a Tokyo izakaya (bar) in April 2015, she was hoping for advice on her fledgling career as a journalist and, perhaps, a recommendation for a job. Yamaguchi, the former Washington bureau chief of Tokyo Broadcasting System, a respected TV network, was well connected. He had written a favourable biography of the prime minister at the time, Shinzo Abe, whom he counted as a friend.

Instead, the meal would mark the start of Ito’s private hell. She tells of how, despite indicating she wished to go home, the then 26-year-old was piled into a taxi and taken to a hotel, where Yamaguchi, more than two decades her senior, raped her. Two years later, against...

The inaugural World Culture Film Festival in Los Angeles has found itself impacted by a dangerous storm half a world away.

Typhoon Gaemi, with top winds speeds equaling a category 3 hurricane, lashed the Philippines and Taiwan before blowing into China Thursday night. It caused widespread travel disruptions all the way west into Bhutan, where filmmaker Pawo Choyning Dorji had been attempting to get a flight to Los Angeles for the opening night of Wcff, a new event that describes itself as a platform for “entertainment that uplifts.”

The festival went ahead with the screening of Dorji’s Oscar-shortlisted dramedy The Monk and the Gun, but instead of being on the ground in L.A., the director participated in a Q&a via Zoom.

Filmmaker Pawo Choyning Dorji joins the World Culture Film Festival via Zoom from Bhutan.

“I was trying to be there in person, but there was a big...

The timing of Apple TV+’s recently launched sci-fi drama series Sunny was doubly fortuitous.

The show stars Rashida Jones as Suzie, an American woman living in Kyoto, Japan, whose life is upended when her husband and son disappear in a mysterious plane crash. As a “consolation” she’s given Sunny, one of a new class of seemingly sentient domestic robots made by her late husband’s electronics company.

Produced by A24 and shot on location, the show had the good luck of going into production in 2022 when Japan’s borders were still mostly closed to tourists due to the pandemic, allowing for unprecedented shooting access to Kyoto’s evocative but usually thronged historic streets. And just as production was winding down, the world’s imagination became transfixed by a powerful new tool — Chat GPT4 — lending the show’s themes of AI’s promise and peril an all-new urgency.

As Sunny begins,...

Revolution+1.On July 8, 2022, Shinzo Abe, who had been the longest-serving prime minister of Japan in its postwar years, was shot and killed in broad daylight in a country with barely any civilian access to firearms. The suspect was immediately arrested, and commentators from all over the world began to speculate about the killer’s motive. After a few days, the police revealed that the 41-year-old Tetsuya Yamagami, who had built his own gun and tracked Abe’s movements, had not originally planned to kill Abe. In fact, the most high-profile political assassination in decades was carried out by a man who cared little for politics. Legendary Japanese filmmaker Masao Adachi, sensing a story sure to be misconstrued by the press, immediately began production on a biopic—not of Abe, but of Yamagami. At the North American premiere of the film, Revolution+1 (2023), last July, he said that this quick turnaround was not intended to garner controversy,...

Shiori Ito – face of Japan's #MeToo movement, one of Time's 100 Most Influential People of 2020, and author of award-winning memoir “Black Box” (2017) – assembled a documentary recording her rollercoaster of a lawsuit against her rapist, Noriyuki Yamagauchi. This marks her debut feature, “Black Box Diaries,” which premiered as a part of the World Cinema – Documentary Competition at Sundance Film Festival last month.

“Black Box Diaries” premiered at Sundance 2024 in the World Cinema – Documentary Competition. Its sales are managed by Dogwoof.

The documentary follows the heels of other stories that have been published that focus on the #MeToo movement, such as Chanel Miller's memoir, “Know My Name” (2019); Ursula Macfarlane's Weinstein investigation “Untouchable” (2019); and more recently, the prolonged court battle between Johnny Depp and Amber Heard (2022). While many of the previous examples are centered in the US, however, Ito's investigative journalistic take on her own rape case explores the legal murkiness of the Japanese court.

In the middle of Black Box Diaries, journalist Shiori Ito’s debut documentary, Ito grins at the camera as she strolls through downtown Tokyo on the day of her book launch. It’s October 18, 2017. The New York Times broke the Harvey Weinstein news two weeks ago. Alyssa Milano popularized the hashtag #MeToo two days ago. Ito, fresh-faced and 28, happily recounts these events to the camera. The world may finally be ready to listen to her.

It’s hard to imagine a time before the #MeToo genie was let out of its bottle, but that’s what Ito asks of viewers as they journey back with her to 2015, when she says she was raped by a senior journalist with connections to then-president Shinzo Abe. Through an incredible amount of personal documentation––primarily videos, audio recordings, and journal entries––she grants viewers unprecedented access into her experience as a woman seeking justice for sex crimes in Japan.

In Black Box Diaries, director Shiori Ito confronts abuse but also a deeply flawed legal system. Her quest for justice begins in spring 2015. Then a young intern at Thomson Reuters, Ito found herself in a nightmarish situation with Noriyuki Yamaguchi, a prominent media figure with political connections in Japan. At the time, he worked at the Tokyo Broadcasting System Television and was the personal biographer for Shinzo Abe, the former prime minister of Japan.

After she reported a sexual assault incident against Yamaguchi she was met with formidable challenges, as she navigated a legal system steeped in outdated laws that placed burden of proof on the victims. Ito’s struggle was not just against her assailant but also against a societal framework that silences survivors. Facing public slander, character assassination and the daunting reality of confronting Yamaguchi, she had no idea that acting as an investigative journalist for her own...

Amid the surfeit of films about women’s rights and men’s abuses of power that have emerged in the wake of the #MeToo reckoning, we haven’t yet seen one quite like “Black Box Diaries.” A tightly wound, heart-on-sleeve procedural documentary, Shiori Ito’s directorial debut identifies a world of systemic iniquities through the prism of a single, long labored-over case of sexual assault — crucially, the director’s own. That raw first-person perspective, untempered by the interests of another filmmaker and given narrative rigor by Ito’s substantial journalistic skills, makes “Black Box Diaries” not just a damning analysis of patriarchal power structures in contemporary Japan, but a vivid evocation of the day-to-day psychological swings and breaks that come with living as a survivor. The title’s allusion to diary-keeping is on point: Ito’s vulnerabilities can be discomfiting to witness, even with her consent.

A standout of the...

On the night of April 3, 2015, Shiori Itō, an intern at Thomson Reuters, met Noriyuki Yamaguchi at a restaurant under the guise of a job interview. Yamaguchi, then the Washington bureau chief of Tokyo Broadcasting System and a personal friend (and biographer) of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, was a mover and shaker in Japanese media and politics with the power to change her career. The last thing Itō remembers from that dinner is getting violently ill in the bathroom. The next thing she remembers is waking up in a hotel room...

In one of the most unusual and inspiring sights which will surely go down in Sundance lore, Black Box Diaries director Shiori Ito led audience members in a post-premiere karaoke rendition of Gloria Gaynor’s ‘I Will Survive’.

‘Black Box Diaries’: Sundance Review

The spontaneous event immediately followed the Q&a session after the world premiere of the Japanese journalist’s debut feature in which she chronicled her struggle for justice against her high-profile rapist.

An exhilarated and exhilarating Ito, microphone still in hand, sung along and invited ticket holders to join her on stage at Prospector Square Theatre...

In one of the most unusual and inspiring sights which will surely go down in Sundance lore, Black Box Diaries director Shiori Ito led audience members in a post-premiere karaoke rendition of Gloria Gaynor’s ‘I Will Survive’.

‘Black Box Diaries’: Sundance Review

The spontaneous event immediately followed the Q&a session after the world premiere of the Japanese journalist’s debut feature in which she chronicled her struggle to seek justice against her high-profile rapist.

An exhilarated and exhilarating Ito, microphone still in hand, sung along and invited ticket holders to join her on stage at Prospector Square...

Japanese talent agency Johnny & Associates, engulfed in one of the largest sexual abuse scandals of the post-#MeToo era, said at a press conference in Tokyo on Monday it would change its name and split into two companies.

The existing company will be renamed Smile-Up and tasked exclusively with providing compensation to the hundreds of sexual abuse victims of late company founder Johnny Kitagawa, who died in July 2019 at age 87. A new, as-yet-unnamed entity will be established to manage the talent agency’s current roster of performers. The company said it will ask its fan club members to come up with the name for the new agency.

The move comes after years of cover-ups and denials by Johnny & Associates and amid mounting pressure within Japan and globally for a reckoning.

An external investigative committee set up by the agency says it had received reports of abuse from 478 of Kitagawa’s victims as of Sept.

The Portuguese festival showcases documentaries from around the world.

The 21st edition of DocLisboa will open with Wang Bing’s Man In Black, and will close with Baan from Portuguese director Leonor Teles.

Man In Black premiered at Cannes and Baan made its debut at Locarno earlier this year.

The festival will take place in Lisbon from October 19-29.

Wang Bing, via videoconference, and Telles both participated in the festival press conference on September 28 at which festival director Miguel Ribeiro revealed this year’s programme in full.

Bing explained his film profiles 86-year-old Wang Xilin, one of China’s most important contemporary classical composers,...

In 1989, Billy Joel released his eleventh album Storm Front which featured his third single that would reach number one on the Billboard Top 100 charts, We Didn’t Start the Fire. We Didn’t Start the Fire was a unique tune in which the lyrics were composed entirely of a laundry list of subjects that dominated news headlines spanning from 1949 to 1989 (which was also Billy Joel’s lifetime at that point). The pop culture hit would address topics such as Beatlemania, the Berlin wall, the Ayatollah, Ho Chi Minh, Catcher in the Rye, The King and I, the crack epidemic and much more.

The song would spawn parodies for use in movies and TV, but there hasn’t been a genuine updated cover until now. The band Fall Out Boy has just released their version with headlines from the last thirty years filling out the lyrics. This single will reportedly be...

The search was on this year for Johnny Depp, Amber Heard, Will Smith, Chris Rock and Jada Pinkett Smith: They topped Google’s just-released list of the Top 10 actors who generated the most Google searches in 2022.

Not only did the five celebrities top Google’s year-end lists of the most-searched actors, they also accounted for four of the top five spots on the overall “People” list, with the only non-actor crashing that top five being Vladimir Putin at No. 4.

See all of the entertainment-related Top 10 Google Search lists below, and click on the image above for a photo gallery.

The most-searched movie? Thor: Love and Thunder, beating out runners-up Black Adam and Top Gun: Maverick. Among TV shows, searchers were most curious about Euphoria, with House of the Dragon at No. 2.

Searches related to celebrity deaths also were tallied, with Queen Elizabeth II taking the top spot, followed by Betty White,...

Hideaki Anno has a reputation for weird endings. His magnum opus, "Neon Genesis Evangelion," frustrated its audience by retreating into the main character's psyche for the last two episodes. "End of Evangelion" channeled the rage of that audience into 87 minutes of apocalyptic spectacle that was even meaner (if more literal) than the original. The "Rebuild of Evangelion" films promised a final ending to the franchise, but took 14 years to wrap up. In the seven years between the third movie and fourth (and final) entry, Anno starred in a Ghibli movie and made the first great modern Godzilla film. The experience of slowly growing older, waiting patiently for the last of the "Evangelion" films to be made, is in itself a part of the final "Evangelion" ending.

The ending of Anno's "Shin Godzilla" is simple compared to the tangled mess that is "Evangelion." Of course, simple is relative. Countless critics have...

"Kamen Rider" celebrated its 50th anniversary on April 3 2021 by announcing three big new projects. One was "Fuuto Pi," an anime sequel to the popular detective series "Kamen Rider W." Another was "Shin Kamen Rider," the newest film by "Neon Genesis Evangelion" director Hideaki Anno. The last was "Kamen Rider Black Sun," a reboot of the classic "Kamen Rider Black." Each pays homage to the past while working to redefine the future of "Kamen Rider" in anime, film and live-action television.

"Kamen Rider Black Sun" was uploaded to Amazon Prime on October 28th, 2022. "Kamen Rider" fans had a tough time finding the series through Amazon's search engine; some resorted to posting direct links to the series via social media so their friends could check it out. "Black Sun" earned a positive write-up on Crunchyroll via tokusatsu expert Alicia Haddick, but has otherwise been completely ignored by the United States television press.

Former Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan has been shot at a protest march in what his supporters are saying was an assassination attempt.

Khan was reportedly shot in the leg after a guman opened fire while he was giving a speech to a large crowd of supporters at a rally in Wazirabad in the nation’s Punjab Province in the past hour. Members of Khan’s Pti party told the BBC another four people were hurt, but no one was killed.

According to a Sky News producer and reporter, who were at the scene, 70-year-old Khan was rushed away from the scene immediately following gunshots and screams, and Sky then spoke to his supporters who said he had survived the assassination attempt. “This was an attempt to kill him, to assassinate him,” one senior aide told Afp.

Supporters at the protest. Credit: Arif Ali/Afp via Getty Images

The Sky News reporter,...

Director for Mainichi Broadcasting System, born in 1965. After graduating from Waseda University, she joined Mainichi Broadcasting System in 1987. After working in the Secretary Department for the President, she became a news reporter in 1989, covering education on-location while being part of the press club for the police and administration of justice. In 1995, when her home was hit by the Great Hanshin Earthquake, she lost all of her essential utilities, and yet she continued reporting for the Kobe bureau office. Since 2015, she has been working solely as a documentary director and

released three documentaries a year for a total of 18 works. (Her Eizou series is a local documentary program started in 1980 that broadcasts late at night once a month. The program captures various social problems on camera and has broadcast over 500 works that reflect the times. Saika has individually won the Broadcast Woman Award in 2018. She also wrote Education and Nationalism: Who Suffocates the Classroom?...

Mainichi Broadcasting System to attend Acfm for the first time.

Japan’s Mainichi Broadcasting System (Mbs) is launching sales on their first theatrical documentary Education And Nationalism, participating in the Asian Contents & Film Market (Acfm) for the first time.

The controversial film is also the first theatrical feature directed by award-winning journalist Hisayo Saika.

“Since Education And Nationalism deals with some of the very important historical issues between Korea and Japan during and after World War II, Acfm is the ideal market at the best timing for us to introduce this film to Korean buyers and audiences as well as those from other countries,...

For many in the West, Japan is considered one of the most well-organized nations in the world, a place where mentality and efficiency find their apogee, and the truth is that, for many years, particularly after WW2, this opinion was not much far from the truth. However, during the latest years and particularly through a number of documentaries that criticize the current system, it has become evident that a number of issues lie underneath the surface, and that many have to do with the now deceased, Shinzo Abe’s government. Hisayo Saika focuses on one of these issues, the revision efforts towards the darkest moments of Japanese history, essentially the Military Comfort Women, the mass suicide at the Battle of Okinawa, and the Nanjing Massacre, which actually starts from changing the facts in school textbooks. “Education and Nationalism” is still playing in theaters around Japan, and close to 40,000 people have already watched it.

The one and only Toshiaki Toyoda is a filmmaker who responds to the times and society and continues to shake the world and cinemas with his unwavering faith and prayers.

With the belief in wolf resurrection at its core, he continues to produce films that challenge the age of chaos every year, including 2019’s Wolf Smoke Calls, 2020’s Day of Destruction, and 2021’s Everybody Commits Seppuku. in 2022 will release his latest film, Alive.

The latest feature film Transcending Dimensions will be produced in the year 2023. On 27 September, when the funeral of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will be held, the production will be announced and a crowdfunding campaign will be launched. The target amount is 100 million yen and support will be sought until 31 December. The image visual released with the production announcement shows a reddish image of the Earth floating in space.

The film, for which a script is currently being written,...

Video Version of this Article Photo: Shinzo Abe The Hollywood Insider would like to pay our condolences to the Abe family and everyone who loved him. We will always remember you Prime Minister Shinzo Abe for your contribution to our world and your efforts in making it a better place for all regardless of the differences. On Friday, July 8, former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was assassinated during a campaign rally. Abe’s death has sent shockwaves throughout the entire world, especially because Japan is a country known for its low percentage of violence. Japan is a country with a population of around 127 million people. Despite the large number of people that live in Japan, rarely does the number of gun deaths exceed more than ten people yearly. Iain Overton, the executive director of the group, Action On Armed Violence, describes this effective gun regulation within Japan by stating, “Ever since guns entered the country,...

Thousands of people lined the streets of Tokyo to mourn the death of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe ahead of his memorial service on Tuesday, four days after he was shot and killed in Nara while on the campaign trail for a Liberal Democratic Party candidate.

“You were supposed to be the one giving the memorial address at my funeral. I enjoyed going often to drink and play golf together,” Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso said in a memorial address, per ABC News.

Abe was shot and killed by...

Lausanne (Switzerland), July 8 (Ians) The International Olympic Committee (Ioc) on Friday mourned the death of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who passed away hours after being shot while addressing an election rally in the city of Nara. According to state broadcaster Nhk, the attack took place at around 11.30 a.m. (local time) near […]...

Update, 1.55 Am Pt, July 8: Japanese broadcaster Nhk is reporting former prime minister Shinzo Abe has died after being shot while giving a speech. He had been in critical condition for several hours prior but attempts to save him failed.

A man in his 40s has been arrested on suspicion of attempted murder after the shooting, which happened near Kyoto in western Japan yesterday morning local time.

Previously, 9.00 Pm Pt, July 7: Multiple media outlets reported that Japan’s former prime minister, Shinzo Abe, was shot while giving a speech in western Japan near Kyoto on Friday. Outlets cited the nation’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno, who confirmed the former Pm was shot around 11:30 a.m. local time.

“Whatever the reason, such a barbaric act can never be tolerated, and we strongly condemn it,” declared Matsuno.

Abe was said to be bleeding as he was loaded into an...

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Japan’s former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has died after he was shot while giving a campaign speech in the city of Nara.

Japan’s public broadcaster Nhk reported that Abe, 67, was shot during a campaign event at 11:30 a.m. local time. He appeared to be bleeding from the chest after being shot from behind with a shotgun mid-speech. Quoting police sources, Nhk reported that Abe was likely hit from behind by shotgun fire.

Nhk reported Abe was flown to Nara Medical University Hospital in Kashihara City. Media reports say Abe was not breathing and his heart had stopped at the scene. At 2:50 p.m., in a press conference, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said Abe was in a “critical condition.” “Currently doctors are doing everything they can,” Kishida told reporters at the prime minister’s residence. “At this moment, I am...

Former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has died after being shot by a lone gunman while on the campaign trail in the Japanese city of Nara Friday morning. The unprecedented shooting comes as Japan gears up for its House of Councillors election, which takes place this Sunday.

According to Japanese national broadcaster Nhk, Abe, 67, was in the ancient capital, located roughly 30 miles outside of Kyoto, giving a stump speech near the city’s Yamato-Saidaiji Station in support of his Liberal Democratic Party (Ldp) when he collapsed at around 11:30 a.

Fayetteville, N.C. — An old man ranting into the night.

That’s how it looked out on the windswept patch of tarmac at the Fayetteville Regional Airport on Saturday night, the venue for President Trump’s latest rally. I had left the press pen behind the TV camera risers — you know, the spot Trump points to during the “fake news! Fake news!” portion of his stump speech — to stretch my legs and warm my bones. The temperatures at the airport had sunk into the 50s and I’d forgotten to bring a coat.

After “Fake” and the portrait of Mamoru Samuragochi, Tatsuya Mori deals with another rather interesting personality, that of journalist Isoko Mochizuki, who has already inspired a feature film before this documentary, namely the multi-awarded “The Journalist“.

“i: Documentary of the Journalist” is screening at Nippon Connection 2020

The majority of the documentary has Mori following Mochizuki with his camera, as she partakes on many press conferences and researches the most important stories of Japan in 2019. In that fashion, her non-stop work has her deal with the transfer of the Us base in Hinoko, Okinawa, the Moritomo Gakuen scandal, which involved Shinzo Abe’s wife, and Shiori Ito’s charges of rape towards Noriyuki Yamaguchi, and the scandal of the cover up that followed. Her research of these cases, which include following Shiori Ito in the various events she participates to communicate her case, interviews with people involved, and questions to the various political offices,...

Japan’s film exhibition business, which shut down in mid-April in response to the government’s state of emergency declaration, has begun slowly reopening. Japan is the world’s third largest cinema box office market behind North America and China.

On May 11 the government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe announced that it was arranging to lift the state of emergency for the 34 prefectures least affected by the coronavirus pandemic. The remaining 13, including Tokyo and Osaka, are still under emergency advisories, which include theater closures, until the end of the month.

Toho Cinemas, Japan’s biggest exhibition chain, has since announced that it will reopen ten of its theaters in the 34 least affected prefectures, on May 15. A handful of independent theaters in these areas are back in business.

On Wednesday, another big chain, Aeon Cinemas, also announced a partial reopening. A total of 27 Aeon multiplexes in 16 prefectures will open their doors...

Tokyo Gap-Financing Market aims to provide a platform for up to 20 selected projects to secure finance through one-on-one meetings.

Tiffcom, the contents market affiliated with Tokyo International Film Festival (Tiff), is launching a gap financing market at its 2020 edition, scheduled to take place November 4-6.

The Tokyo Gap-Financing Market (Tgfm) aims to provide a platform for up to 20 selected projects to secure finance through one-on-one meetings with producers, sales agents, distributors, financiers, broadcasters and other potential funders.

The initiative will support Japanese, Asian and international producers – with no requirements regarding nationality or language of the projects – across the categories of fiction films and TV series,...

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe belatedly declared a national emergency in Japan on Thursday, sending nearly all of the country's cinemas that were still operating into shutdown.

Japan is the world's third-largest theatrical film market, and a prolonged lockdown there will be a significant contributor to the global box office crash caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

Japanese law doesn't provide a mechanism for forcing business closures or preventing people from going out — Abe's declaration amounts to just a strong urging — but much of Japan's populace has already been avoiding crowded spaces like cinemas ...

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe belatedly declared a national emergency in Japan on Thursday, sending nearly all of the country's cinemas that were still operating into shutdown.

Japan is the world's third-largest theatrical film market, and a prolonged lockdown there will be a significant contributor to the global box office crash caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

Japanese law doesn't provide a mechanism for forcing business closures or preventing people from going out — Abe's declaration amounts to just a strong urging — but much of Japan's populace has already been avoiding crowded spaces like cinemas ...

The race to find a cure for the novel coronavirus is getting major assistance in Japan from Fujifilm, the global photography and imaging company based in Tokyo. A new report from Wired states that a team of Fujifilm employees was tasked by Japan’s health minister, Katsunobu Kato, to find an antiviral pill that could be used to help fight Covid-19 symptoms. The Fujifilm team turned to Favipiravir, a version of an anti-influenza drug called Avigan (the Fujifilm subsidiary Toyama Chemical developed Avigan decades ago). According to Wired, Favipiravir was previously used to cut the Ebola rate in Guinea from 30 percent to 15 percent.

Beginning March 28, Japan’s prime minster Shinzo Abe “designated Avigan as Japan’s standard treatment for Covid-19.” According to Wired’s report, “At a hospital in Shenzhen, Covid-19 patients treated with Favipiravir tested negative for the virus after a median of four days, rather than the 11 days...

Japanese Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe says he is ready to declare a state of emergency from as early as Tuesday, as part of a growing response to the novel coronavirus outbreak. The declaration would affect Tokyo, second city Osaka and five other densely populated prefectures.

The Abe government had attempted to resist emergency legislation, but the biological and economic impact of the virus’s spread now justify such action. Abe announced the plans in a briefing Monday evening from his offices.

“(The declaration) is estimated to last a period of one month. This state of emergency declaration is to ensure the medical care system stays intact and to ask for even more cooperation from the public to avoid contact with each other to reduce infection as much as possible,” Abe said.

Tokyo reported 83 new confirmed infections on Monday, following 117 on Saturday, and a grim daily record of 143 on Sunday. Excluding...

The Tokyo 2020 Olympics, which were postponed to 2021 last week due to the coronavirus pandemic, have officially been rescheduled.

The games open on July 23rd and close on August 8th, 2021. The Paralympics will be held from August 24th through September 5th, 2021.

Originally scheduled between July 24th and August 9th this year, the games were put on hold after Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) agreed to postpone them last Tuesday in light of COVID-19. According to a statement by the Ioc on Monday, the new...

Ken Shimura, a comedian who was a fixture on Japanese television for decades, died on Sunday evening from the coronavirus, the Japanese media reported Monday. He was 70, and immediately before his illness had been set for his first starring role in a feature film.

Shimura entered a Tokyo hospital on March 20 with fever and pneumonia and tested positive for Covid-19 on March 23. He is the first prominent Japanese entertainment world figure to die of the virus.

Born Yasunori Shimura in Tokyo in 1950, Shimura joined the Drifters, a comedy band, in 1974. The Drifters were already kings of Japanese television for their highly-rated variety show “Hachijidayo Zeninshugo!”, but Shimura injected a youthful energy and impudence that kept their popularity soaring.

A rubber-faced comic who took inspiration from Jerry Lewis, Shimura was hardly subtle – one of his characters, a middle-aged pervert, wore a swan’s-head strap-on for laughs – but he smoothly survived the...

Sony has provided a light breakdown of how the coronavirus is impacting its games, music, film and TV and electronics divisions. The breakdown is as follows:

Games and network services: “Sony estimates that there will be no material impact on this business for the current fiscal year. Although no issues have emerged so far, Sony is carefully monitoring the risk of delays in production schedules for game software titles at both its first-party studios and partner studios, primarily in Europe and the U.S.”

Music: “Especially outside of Japan, the business has started to be...

Olympic champion swimmer Ryan Lochte says that while he is disappointed by the postponement of the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo due to the coronavirus pandemic, it's a "bump in the road" for him and fellow athletes. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe had announced on Tuesday that the games, which were originally set to start on July 24, "will be held by the summer of 2021." Lochte, 36, has competed in four previous Olympics, where he won 12 medals—half of them gold, and has spent the past few years training for the 2020 event. "As soon as I saw it, I was disappointed," Lochte said on ABC's Good Morning America in a home interview carried out via...

Veteran Japanese comedian Ken Shimura, who was hospitalized for pneumonia on Monday, tested positive for the novel coronavirus on Tuesday, his agency Izawa Office announced Wednesday. His condition is not currently critical.

Shimura is the first prominent entertainment world figure in Japan to test positive for the virus. He was set to star in the new Yoji Yamada film “God of Cinema” that Shochiku is producing to mark its 100th anniversary as a film studio. The shoot, originally scheduled to start late this month, has now been postponed indefinitely. Television programs featuring the 70-year-old Shimura, who has been a fixture on the small screen for decades, have also been affected.

His role in “God of Cinema” as a lovable ne’er-do-well who has been a life-long film fan would be his first starring turn in a feature. The film was scheduled for a December release.

Shimura appears in “Yell,” a...