James Weston Higginbotham was still missing in Japan a week after he vanished, and his mother was taking the search public. Nancy Higginbotham posted on Friday that it was Day 7 and urged hikers, trail runners and other outdoor enthusiasts to help look for her 20-year-old son.
That appeal came as the search for Higginbotham stretched into another day in and around Yamashina, Kyoto, where police said he was last seen after leaving his hotel on May 29. Security camera footage showed him walking alone on the streets of Yamashina shortly after he left, and his mother said he was last known to have entered the mountainous forest area nearby.
The mother’s post mattered because the search had already become a large, difficult operation. Heavy rain from a typhoon delayed it until Wednesday, and on Thursday dozens of Japanese police officers moved through waist-high mud while search dogs and helicopters were also deployed. Police said they had completed the search of the northern part of Yamashina and were continuing elsewhere, a sign that the effort was still active but had yet to produce a break.
Nancy Higginbotham said the family had confidence in the professionalism and dedication of Japanese authorities, but she also made clear why they were widening the appeal. Weston Higginbotham had disappeared after a family argument over ChatGPT during a trip, yet she said she did not believe he was a danger to himself or to strangers. In her view, he was more likely to withdraw than to lash out, which is why the family was asking people on foot in the mountains to look carefully rather than assuming the case was a threat to others.
Weston Higginbotham is a biosystems engineering major at Auburn University, but for now the fact that matters most is that a young man was still unaccounted for after seven days in rugged terrain. The search was moving beyond the first areas police had covered, and the question left hanging was plain: what happened after he walked away from the hotel and toward the forested ground near Yamashina?
