Finally out of Facebook Jail! And other stories

Two months and ten days after my one-month Facebook Jail sentence began, Facebook has finally deigned to let me out. Yay. Now let’s see how long I can stay out before the modbots once again take offense at some perfectly acceptable meme I posted years ago.

Arizona: A Portland, Maine man who disappeared from the Grand Canyon on December 20 has been, amazingly enough, found alive and in good health.

Connecticut: Found this article featuring various missing persons from that state.

Georgia: In Atlanta they’re going to set up a memorial for the missing and murdered children lumped under the Atlanta Child Killer case. The city council has allocated funds and approved a design. Just a few days ago I watched the series on the Atlanta child murders on HBO Max. It was very disturbing. I don’t know if Wayne Williams killed anybody, but he DEFINITELY did not get a fair trial.

Michigan: They’re still looking for Dean Marie “Deanie” Peters, a 14-year-old girl who disappeared from Grand Rapids in 1981. The article focuses on the theory that a local teen boy drove at Deanie to scare her and make her think he was trying to hit her, but he accidentally DID hit her and killed her. This person allegedly told different versions of this story to a couple of dozen people before his death, but it has never been confirmed.

Oregon: They’re still looking for Kacey Ann Perry, a 10-year-old girl who disappeared from Portland in 1990. The article has several photos I’d not previously seen.

Pennsylvania: They’re still looking for John Francis Lango and the local paper has done a two-part series on his disappearance: here’s part one and part two. Although his family and most of his friends recall John as a happy-go-lucky, popular sort of guy, one acquaintance said he’d grown shy, introverted and “sullen” prior to his 1988 disappearance from Pottsville, a month before his eighteenth birthday. None of his loved ones think he ran away.

Texas: They found the car of Carey Mae Parker in Lake Tawakoni. Carey was 23 when she disappeared from Quinlan in 1991. So far they’ve only been able to recover one half of the vehicle, and so far no human remains have been found.

Utah: Here is an article about the disappearances and murders of various Native American people in Utah.

Australia: They’re still looking for Colleen Walker-Craig, a 16-year-old girl who disappeared from Bowraville, New South Wales in 1990. Her clothes were found in the river, weighted by rocks, but no sign of her.

Also Australia: A jawbone that washed up on a beach in New South Wales in 2011 has been identified as Bill Moran, a 24-year-old man who was lost at sea when his boat sank off Evans Head in 1979. Bill’s wife Philippa also died in the accident, but I think her body was found earlier.

Canada: There’s been a podcast episode about the 1997 disappearance of 27-year-old Danny Gaulton, who was last seen in Grande Prairie, Alberta. He told his roommates he was going to work, but in fact he called in sick that night. Neither he nor his car was ever found.

England: They’re still looking for Anne Simpson, a 60-year-old woman who disappeared from Skegness in 2004. She was last seen drinking with two biker types and her partner.

Japan: I found this interesting article about how North Korea kidnapped some people, including a thirteen-year-old girl, from Japan and took them back to North Korea so they could help train future spies.

Asian Pacific American Heritage Month: Kianna and Gunnar Berg

In honor of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, I am profiling one Asian or Pacific Islander MP for every day of the month of May. Today’s case is actually two cases, the missing siblings Kianna Joanna Berg and Gunnar David Berg.

The children, who are half white, half Japanese, were abducted by their mother, Naoko Numakami, from their Fairfax, Virginia home and taken to her native Japan. They were eight and nine years old at the time.

Naoko told Kianna and Gunnar’s father that she was just taking the kids to Japan for a vacation, but once in that country she refused to return them. He hasn’t seen them since.

Unfortunately for the kids’ father, it’s probably going to stay that way. I don’t know if there are ANY cases where the Japanese government actually agreed to return an internationally abducted child. I don’t think family courts, as such, really exist there.

Both kids are now over eighteen and could choose to go back to the US on their own if they like, but my guess is that like many family abduction victims, they’ve been alienated against their left-behind father.

Asian Pacific American Heritage Month: Ai Adams

In honor of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, I am profiling one Asian or Pacific Islander MP for every day of the month of May. Today’s case is Ai Adams, a 38-year-old Japanese-American woman who disappeared from Beaver, Alaska on May 20, 2017.

Her fate is known: she, her husband Clifford, and another person were on the Yukon River when their boat capsized. Ai and Clifford never made it to shore, but their friend was wearing a life jacket and she survived. Clifford’s body didn’t turn up for a month. Ai’s was never found.

I actually have a friend who has a friend who knew the Adamses. In addition, Ai was photographed and quoted for this New York Times article which came out just months before her death. She sounds like a very brave person, to have taken the enormous leap from the megalopolis of Tokyo to living off the land in northern Alaska.

“Life is just once,” she told the New York Times reporter.

ET entry for today

I’ve got an Executed Today entry posted: Tsutomu Miyazaki, a Japanese serial killer of little girls who was executed on this day in 2008. He was quite the sicko.

Time Magazine article about evaporated people

Last fall I blogged about a book I read about people in Japan who walk out of their lives and never come back. It’s called “evaporating.” It’s very common, said the book, common enough that there are businesses specifically made for these people, to help them flee.

The story did strike me as kind of surreal and TIME Magazine has published an article about it saying the same:

It was captivating. But early inquiries revealed that many in Japan doubted the veracity of Mauger’s reporting. “Most of us who saw [the story] found it unbelievable,” says Charles McJilton, a longtime expatriate resident of Japan… Parts of Mauger’s book are “fantasy at best,” McJilton tells TIME.

Later on:

A cultural prevalence of vanishing…is not reflected in the country’s official statistics. Japan’s National Police Agency registered around 82,000 missing persons in 2015 and noted that some 80,000 had been found by the end of the year. Only 23,000 of them had remained missing for more than a week and about 4,100 of them turned out to be dead. In Britain, which has about half the population of Japan, more than 300,000 calls were made to police in 2015 to report a missing person.

The Missing Persons Search Support Association of Japan (MPS), a non-profit set up to provide support to the families of the evaporated, argues that official numbers reflect under-reporting and are way too low. “The actual, unregistered number is estimated at several times 100,000,” claims the organization’s website.

The aforementioned businesses actually do exist, and are described in the article. TIME interviewed the owner of one such business. She charges

between ¥50,000 ($450) and ¥300,000 ($2,600) depending on the amount of possessions somebody wants to flee with, how far they’re going, and whether the move needs to happen under the cover of darkness. Taking along children, or evading debt collectors, can push prices higher.

Anyway, check out the article. It’s really cool.

Vanished: The Evaporated People of Japan

Yesterday I read a book, translated from the French, by journalists Lena Mauger and Stephane Remael, called Vanished: The “Evaporated People” of Japan in Stories and Photographs.

I don’t know much about Japan and I had never heard anything about this, but apparently it’s a pretty normal thing for people to leave and never come back, and according to the authors over half of these disappearances are never reported to the police. There were a lot of them in the nineties especially when Japan’s economy was on the rocks.

There’s a name for it: evaporating. Sometimes it’ll be just one person from the family — a breadwinner who lost his job, a college student son who failed an important exam — and sometimes the entire family will go. Many of the evaporated people wind up committing suicide within a few days of leaving, but many more will just pop up somewhere else in the country and start over. There’s an entire neighborhood in Tokyo full of these people.

In fact, there are even entire companies whose job it is to help people evaporate. Mauger and Remael talked about a company called something like “Midnight Movers.” By day they moved furniture; by night they moved people. They didn’t have to advertise the people part; the “midnight” in their company name was a hidden indication that they were willing to move more than just your stuff. The price was the equivalent of like $5,000, around three times the cost of an ordinary move. The whole “midnight movers” concept sounds like it could become a movie or even a TV show here in the States.

Anyway. Check out the book if you’re interested.

Opinions?

I’ve got someone writing to me asking if I can add an MP who vanished from a military base in Okinawa, Japan. I’ve never encountered this issue before.

I’ve put an unofficial moratorium on posting cases of Americans who go missing abroad, but I realize that US military bases, as well as embassies, count as American soil wherever they’re at. But, regardless of what international law says, wherever this young woman is, it’s likely to be somewhere in Japan. And given the very, very long list of US cases I’ve got waiting to be posted, I just…don’t want to do this one.

What do y’all think?

Make-a-List Monday: Chinese, Japanese and Vietnamese people

MPs who are originally from China, Japan and Vietnam. I decided it was sufficient if the person was just raised there, even if I don’t know for sure they were born there. Needless to say, there’s probably quite a few people I missed, since I rarely find out an MP’s national origin.

China
Lian Fan Feng
Jie Zhao Li
Qingping Ouyang
Xiang Sun
Yim Yeung Tsui
Yuan Xia Wang
Sifeng Wu
Wengsheng Zheng
Yinzhou Zheng

Japan
James P. Higham III
Keisuke Koizumi
Masuko Makoto
Hiroko Nemoto
Masumi Watanabe
Frederic Hiro Yamamoto

Vietnam
Hiep T. Luu
Van Thay Nguyen
Ducong Trinh
Khoi Dang Vu

ET entry out of Japan

Kojiro Asakura, a property assessor who slaughtered an entire family — mom, dad and three children under the age of ten — cause they wouldn’t move out of the house he bought. The sole survivor was the oldest child, who was away at camp. He committed his crime in 1983 but wasn’t executed until 2001. I guess it’s quite similar to the case of John Gilman from two weeks ago, except in Gilman’s case, the family he killed were living in their house legally.

Fun fact: in Japan, people on death row aren’t informed in advance of their execution date. They find out in the morning when the guard comes to their cell to say, “Today you die.” Their families aren’t informed either, until afterwards, when they get a call to come get the body. Seems kinda cruel and unusual to me.

The latest in MP news

During my UTI-induced sabbatical, the following things happened:

As about twelve thousand people informed me by email, Chioma Gray has been found. At age fifteen she ran away to Mexico with her boyfriend, Andrew Tafoya, who’d already been convicted of statutory rape in her case. The case was classified as an abduction. Well, recently Chioma called home, then flew back and reunited with her loved ones after five years. She married Tafoya while they were in Mexico, his lawyer says.

There’s been some new activity in the Jill Troia case. Police have long suspected a presumed serial killer named David Parker Ray in her case and are looking for her body again. Jill was 22 when she disappeared from New Mexico in 1995.

Police have launched a new search for the body of Jessica O’Grady. She was 19, a college freshman and pregnant when she disappeared from Nebraska in 2006. Her boyfriend, Christopher Edwards, was later convicted of her murder. The cops are looking under Christopher’s father’s back patio.

I found this interesting article about people in Japan who are missing because of the tsunami. If they haven’t been found alive by now, chances are they’re dead and will never BE found. The Japanese government is taking steps to have such people be declared dead much earlier than usual, like the US did in the 9-11 attacks.

And I found yet another article about kids being kidnapped in China. It’s a long one, but very interesting and enlightening. It’s a very sad situation over there.