TOKYO — Japanese police are giving up their search for an American poet who went missing on one of the remote islands, they said Saturday, a day after a U.S. rescue team said they had no luck finding him.
Craig Arnold, a University of Wyoming assistant professor of English and an award-winning poet, vanished April 26. He was in Japan as part of a creative writing program and was hiking on a volcano on the island of Kuchinoerabu-jima, which is about 30 miles (50 kilometers) off Japan’s southern Kyushu island.
A police spokesman said what had happened to Arnold was still unclear, but their search team was being withdrawn Saturday as prospects for finding him fade.
Overnight in the U.S., the University of Wyoming said in a release that Arnold had likely fallen from a cliff and didn’t survive.
They “learned from the private search group it hired that Arnold likely fell from a high and dangerous cliff, and there is virtually no possibility he could have survived the fall,” the university said.
“We had truly hoped for a different outcome to this story,” UW President Tom Buchanan said. “On behalf of all the faculty and staff at the University of Wyoming, I extend my deepest regrets to Craig’s family and fiancee.” David Kovar, of the California-based 1st Special Response Group, said Friday that four members of his team followed Arnold’s tracks over the top of the volcano to an extremely steep area of the island.
The team was leaving the island, but the Japanese government has committed a technical climbing team to continue to search the area the American team identified, he said.
Earlier, Kovar had said the team had dramatically reduced the size of the search area and expressed hope that progress would be made.
Arnold, 41, was in Japan through the U.S.-Japan Friendship Commission’s Creative Artists Exchange Fellowship and was working on a book on volcanoes.
