Shigeru and Sakie Yokota have faced a ceaseless struggle since the day their daughter went missing.

It was the evening of November 15, 1977, when 13-year-old Megumi Yokota suddenly disappeared on her way home from her junior high school in the coastal area of Niigata city in northwestern Japan.

So began the Yokota family’s anguish and their desperate search for their daughter – said to have been the largest in the history of the Niigata prefecture’s police department. The police at first thought it was a kidnap-for-ransom.

It wasn’t until nearly 20 years later, in January 1997, that they learned