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Around midday on October 22, 2014, a passing motorist saw a Japanese woman walking north along the Ingraham Trail on the outskirts of Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories, Canada. Several days later, after stories in the local media that , 45, who had been visiting the city from her home in southern Japan, had gone missing, she reported the sighting. No one else has reported seeing her since then. Yoshikubo's absence was first noted five days after that sighting, when staff at her hotel noticed she had not checked out two days after her stay was to have ended. In her room they found her luggage, still packed; she had apparently never boarded her flight home either. Footage from the hotel's security camera showed her leaving shortly before she was last seen along the road. When that sighting was reported in the news, it suggested to many residents that she might have gotten lost in the vast expanse of taiga surrounding the city, and they augmented official search efforts with their own ventures into the bush. The case attracted considerable media interest not only across Canada but in Japan, where Yellowknife is a popular destination for those seeking to view the northern lights. A week after Yoshikubo's disappearance, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) announced that they were calling off the search, as their investigation, in cooperation with Japanese police, had led them to believe that she had intended to commit suicide. Her family, from whom she had been estranged for some time, doubted that conclusion, pointing to evidence that suggested she intended to return. Police continued searching for the body they expected to find, using areas she may have visited, for training exercises. Ten months later, a hunter found some of her personal effects, along with human remains, in a wooded area north of the city. The RCMP confirmed that the items belonged to Yoshikubo but said identifying the remains could take months. She is still officially considered missing. ==Background== Since the early 1990s, Yellowknife, capital of Canada's Northwest Territories, has become a popular destination for tourists from Japan. Many come to see the northern lights; while it is locally believed that Japanese folklore holds that a child conceived under them will enjoy good luck and good health, this is an urban legend resulting from a joke on an episode of the American television series ''Northern Exposure''.〔 Although Alaska and Scandinavia are also attractive for their auroral displays, Yellowknife is a particularly desirable location for Japanese aurora tourism〔 due to its generally flat and undeveloped surrounding terrain and predominantly clear (albeit cold) weather during its long winter nights.〔 It is estimated that 20% of the city's tourists come from Japan; many hotels publish their restaurant menus in both Japanese and English.〔 Unaccompanied, Yoshikubo arrived in Yellowknife from her home in the city of Uto, on the southern Japanese island of Kyushu, on October 17, 2014, a trip she had arranged through a tour operator in Toronto. She checked into the Explorer Hotel, the city's largest, for a week's stay. After doing so, she asked if she could book a seat on an aurora tour and was told they had shut down for the season.〔 October and November are off-peak times for Japanese tourism in Yellowknife. The northern lights are not as visible as they are at other times of the year and there is usually not enough snow cover for dogsledding, another activity popular with tourists who visit the city in winter. There is, however, enough to make walking on the trails through the boreal forest and bedrock outcrops in and around the city potentially dangerous for unprepared, unguided visitors. The trails themselves become icy and swampy, and the snow makes it harder to distinguish them from the surrounding bush.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Disappearance of Atsumi Yoshikubo」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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