Japanese authorities make final search for US poet missing on remote island

Search for missing US poet in Japan may end

TOKYO — The weeklong search for an award-winning U.S. poet who disappeared while hiking up a volcano on a remote Japanese island has yielded no clues and will end after a final day of searching, a police official said Tuesday.

An effort involving police, rescue workers, search dogs and a police helicopter will continue through Wednesday and then be called off, local police official Yoshihiku Kuzuhara said.

University of Wyoming professor Craig Arnold was reported missing April 27 when he didn’t return from his hike on the tiny island of Kuchinoerabu-jima, about 30 miles (50 kilometers) off the coast of Japan’s southern Kyushu island.

“There are about 40 people on the island searching now,” Kuzuhara said.

Japanese authorities say they’ve ruled out that Arnold is either inside the volcano’s crater or at the barren top of the mountain. U.S. military aircraft were involved in the search during its first day.

David Marks, a spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo, said he wasn’t sure if any search efforts would continue once local police end their search.

The island, which is mostly covered by dense vegetation, is about seven miles (11 kilometers) long and three miles (five kilometers) wide and dominated by the 1,800-foot (550-meter) volcano, which last erupted in 1980.

Arnold, 41, had been traveling all over the world, working on a book about volcanoes. He is the author of two award-winning books of poetry and was in Japan through the U.S.-Japan Friendship Commission’s Creative Artists Exchange Fellowship.

He grew up in a U.S. Air Force family and lived four years on the Japanese island of Okinawa, where the U.S. military has a base.