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FILE --This undated file photo released by Ausable Press shows Craig Arnold, 41. Arnold, an assistant professor of English at the University of Wyoming and a published poet. The search for Arnold who disappeared on a remote Japanese island will end Wednesday, May 6, 2009,a police official said. (AP Photo/Ausable Press, Amanda Abel) |
TOKYO (AP) — Authorities have scaled down their search for an award-winning U.S. poet who disappeared while hiking up a volcano on a remote Japanese island because their efforts have yielded no clues for more than a week, police said Wednesday.
University of Wyoming assistant professor Craig Arnold, 41, was reported missing April 27 after he failed to return from a hike on the tiny island of Kuchinoerabu-jima, about 30 miles (50 kilometers) off the coast of Japan's southern Kyushu island.
Ten rescue workers, including policemen and firefighters, left for the day's search after sunrise Wednesday, down from 40 people through Tuesday, local police official Takashi Yamasaki said. They will be hiking up the volcano while combing through the area, he added.
Yamasaki said the poet has not returned to a local inn for nine days since he left for a hike.
"We have not found anything, including his belongings," another local police official, Yoshiyuki Kuzuhara, said.
A U.S.-based search-and-rescue organization sent four people to Japan to keep up the search.
The searchers from the 1st Special Response Group arrived Tuesday night. Their strategy will be to look carefully for Arnold's trail and then pursue any signs, said David Kovar, founder of the nonprofit organization based in Mountain View, California.
Japanese authorities say they had ruled out Arnold being 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.
Kuzuhara said the mountain has no hiking trail, and the locals hardly go there.
The island, with a population of just 150 people, is covered by dense vegetation. It 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 had been traveling around 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.
Since arriving in Japan in mid-March, Arnold had updated his blog "Volcano Pilgrim: Five Months in Japan as a Wandering Poet," almost daily. The last entry was dated April 26, the day before his disappearance, when he wrote about Miyakejima, another volcanic island off the southern coast of Tokyo.
Arnold 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 several bases.
Associated Press Writer Mead Gruver in Cheyenne, Wyoming, contributed to this report.
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No Sign of Poet Lost in Japan
The Japanese police said that a weeklong search had not turned up any details on the whereabouts of Craig Arnold, an American poet who has been missing on a Japanese island since last week, The Associated Press reported. Mr. Arnold, 41, a professor at the University of Wyoming, has been missing since April 27, when he went hiking up a volcano on Kuchinoerabu, a small island near the coast of Japan’s southern Kyushu island. He had been visiting there on a fellowship provided by the United States-Japan Friendship Commission’s Creative Artists Exchange. About 40 police officers, firefighters and rescue workers had been searching for him, but Yoshiyuki Kuzuhara, a local police officer, told The Associated Press, “We have not found anything, including his belongings.” The police said they had ruled out the possibilities that Mr. Arnold had fallen into the volcano’s crater or was stranded at its peak.
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