Whereabouts of 141 children nationwide unknown

Nice bit of presumption. Now why don't they actually make efforts to find out?

Maria

Considering that there were 2,098 children listed as missing in May, and that now, only 141 remain unaccounted for, I'd say "they" have done a god job.

It's very difficult to find people who don't want to be found. NHK had a story on this last night and it showed one child and her mother who moved from hotel to hotel to avoid being found by the mother's abusive husband.

Wow, assuming all the speculations in this article are correct, only 69 kids are missing? Very impressive, Japan. I think there are thousands missing in most developed countries. And by "missing" I mean runaways, kids kidnapped by parents, strangers, others, etc.

Of the 141, 72 had a non-Japanese parent and a foreign passport, leading authorities to assume that they probably had moved overseas, NTV reported.

OK, they probably moved overseas. Case closed.

16 million kids you are bound to lose some of them. Sad but true.

No children should be unaccounted for but 141 out of millions of children is an infinitesimally small percentage.

Of the 141, 72 had a non-Japanese parent and a foreign passport, leading authorities to assume that they probably had moved overseas, NTV reported.

... but another way of reading this statistic might be that while "half" children are only a very small percentage of the population they make up more than 50% of missing children.

So what we could be looking at here is a disproportionately high rate of "half" children being abducted, killed, abused, or other horrors...

And the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare wants to just handwave this and say, "Oh, they're probably overseas". It is ridiculously easy to check this. It is only 72 names. Get a spreadsheet of all the immigration records for the last 10 years, and simply use the "find" function for their names. That'll tell you when they last left and/or entered Japan. And these records are digitised, so any 10-year-old with basic computer skills could solve this problem that has the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare so baffled.

There are also children that have never been registered with their town offices by their parents because of issues their being illegitimate.

Plus there are children, Japanese children, who do not attend local schools and go to "American" schools that are not officially recognized by MEXT and those children were never registered in the areas that they live in because the parents would be forced to send them to the local ES or JHS.

Too many assumptions....

I think the people that are saying there are too many assumptions are actually the ones assuming too much. For example, it's easy to say "the police are just assuming" if they say that some may have run away with mothers/fathers due to abuse, but in reality there is probably good reason they say as much (ex. previously filed complaints about abuse and/or crimes of domestic violence involving those registered). It's not like they're going to reveal such cases to the public in their findings on why some might be missing. Second, I think having located all but 141 out of more than 2000 is pretty impressive. Third, those who say that they've never been registered because they might be illegitimate are missing the point: those who have not been registered are not among those counted -- found or missing.

Third, those who say that they've never been registered because they might be illegitimate are missing the point: those who have not been registered are not among those counted -- found or missing.

Which then, makes the numbers wrong.

Think the system might be at fault and in desperate need of change, whoops mentioned the "change" word. Who on these group of Islands would want that!