WEI Qiujie was only meant to be in Japan for a week.
The 27-year-old primary school teacher from China had travelled there for a solo trip and was staying in a hostel in Sapporo, a picturesque, mountainous city on the island of Hokkaido.
She checked in on July 20, having paid in full ahead of her five-day stay, and was captured on CCTV in happy spirits, leaving and returning to the guesthouse as she went about her holiday.
But on July 25 — the day she was meant to check out of the hotel and fly back to her hometown of Nanping, in China’s Fujian province — she apparently vanished. There is no record of Wei boarding her flight home or leaving Japan.
When hostel staff grew concerned she hadn’t checked out, they went into her empty room and found the suitcase, which contained a hand-scrawled note to her parents