Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to discuss the issues of disappearance from the perspective of missing persons' families. While much attention has been paid to cases of disappearance in natural disasters, accidents at sea or wars because missing persons' lives in those situations are obviously in danger, cases where we cannot conjecture the missing persons' life and death have been overlooked. In this paper, "disappearance" is defined as the latter cases of disappearance. In order to convey the problem of "disappearance" that cannot be explained by the circumstances of a missing persons' life and death, I analyze the judgments of missing persons' families concerning the life and death of their missing relative, and the troubles they encounter from a perspective drawing on the sociology of death. On that basis, I conducted interviews with missing persons' families, and made the following findings. Firstly, it is hard for family members to decide as to whether to accept their missing relative as being alive or deceased. In these situations, it is often the case that missing persons' families have been deeply concerned about the missing person's safety for a prolonged period. Moreover, families' judgments about the missing persons' life and death are also influenced by the police's objective judgment and the legal treatment of missing persons. The discrepancies between these judgments on the life and death of missing persons compounds the problems for missing persons' families in terms of finding the missing person, dealing with social procedure and psychological conflict over the adjudication of the missing person's disappearance.
