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A Chicago woman traveling around Japan for the past month with a male friend has mysteriously vanished — as her distressed family say they haven’t heard from her in nearly two weeks.
Kandace Schipper’s relatives filed a missing person report with Chicago cops and alerted the US Embassy after the 29-year-old suddenly stopped making daily contact with them on June 4.
“Every single day she had been communicating with family and friends,” Schipper’s brother-in-law, Adam Willea, told WGNTV.
“I mean text, phone calls, pictures, updates, Instagram posts. And then it all abruptly ended on June 4th.”
No one has heard from Schipper’s travel buddy, 27-year-old Luis Torres, either.
Based on a credit card transaction, her family said Schipper’s last known location was in the Shibuya City area on June 5.
Schipper touched down in the country on May 8 and was pictured standing alongside a “Welcome to Tokyo” sign inside the airport.
Her family say the Tokyo Metropolitan Police won’t help until she misses her flight home.
“I guess it’s [an] issue because technically her flight home isn’t scheduled yet,” Willea said.
“So, until she misses her flight home, they won’t even start a report.”
It wasn’t immediately clear when Schipper was slated to return to the US.
“We’re here stateside. There’s literally nothing we can do,” Willea said.
“So, this helpless feeling of not knowing if she is in a hospital, is she being held somewhere against her will? Is she hurt? There’s nothing we can even do because it’s in Toyko, Japan. We need feet on the ground over there.”
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