Japan's missing hikers spotlight lacklustre efforts at locating foreigners
Five years after a French woman disappeared on a hiking trip in Japan, her family back home in France is again seeking information about her disappearance and pushing Japanese authorities to step up efforts to locate her.
The family's renewed call for information follows the authorities' seemingly cavalier attitude towards locating the missing woman, highlighting the issue of sporadic missing foreign travellers in Japan and raising questions about the seriousness of officials to resolve such disappearances.
Tiphaine Veron was 36 when she went missing on July 29, 2018, in the popular mountain town of Nikko, north of Tokyo. She had checked into her hotel in the town, left her luggage and passport in her room, and then vanished.
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The Veron family is convinced that her disappearance was not an accident. In a book published last year titled Tiphaine where are you? , the family detailed issues they had experienced in their dealings with Japanese police and the country's judicial system.
In response to an appeal from the family, the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances formally requested in April that Japanese authorities improve cooperation with their French counterparts, after France had - in September 2018 - opened a kidnapping investigation into the case. A government official said in mid-July that Japan had "properly responded" to the UN panel's request.
The UN committee said that French authorities had asked Japanese police to collect and preserve mobile phone data in 2018 and again in 2021, but "received no response".
Japanese police marked the five-year anniversary of Veron's disappearance by handing out fliers at Nikko station seeking information.
On social media, there was much speculation as to her fate, ranging from an accident to abduction or murder. Social media users have questioned why security cameras failed to pick up her movements after she left her hotel, and why investigators failed to access data from her mobile phone.
Others pointed out that a US national is also listed as missing in Japan, while the grisly killings of two British women - Lucie Blackman in 2000 and Lindsay Hawker in 2007 - undermine the widely held belief that Japan is among the safest nations in the world to visit.
The Veron case shares some similarities with the unsolved disappearance of Patricia Murad earlier this year. Murad, a 61-year-old from Connecticut in the United States, was on a solo hiking trip in Japan and vanished on April 10 in central Japan's Wakayama prefecture.
In a June interview with The Daily Mail, her husband Kirk said his "gut" was telling him that his experienced and well-travelled wife had "trusted the wrong person".
"I think she struck up a conversation with someone and trusted them enough to accept a ride from them," he said. "Her toe was giving her problems, so it's possible she accepted a ride and then was abducted."
Murad's family and friends have travelled to Japan several times since her disappearance, working with police and local mountain rescue teams along the route she took and even chartering helicopters and drones to search larger areas of the forest surrounding the trail, but to no avail.
Japanese police suspended their search in mid-May after finding no clues as to Murad's fate, despite pleas from the family to continue looking. In early June, after another fruitless trip to Japan, the family halted their own efforts.
But the Veron family is not giving up and continue to urge Japanese authorities to do more.
"Since she went missing, we have been working hard to find Tiphaine, in a country where missing persons cases are not investigated," reads a message the family posted on a website dedicated to finding her.
"We won't give up. We need answers," Tiphaine's brother Damien told Kyodo News on Saturday.
This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).
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