There, he met journalist Kenji Goto, who warned him, "if you identify yourself as a military contractor in a combat area, you'll be marked as an enemy." As the news began to generate tweets in Japan, key phrases in Japanese, like "236 million yen," (the ransom amount in Japanese currency) and "within 72 hours," were copied and pasted into new hashtags, ensuring the news' quick spread. Unlike Yukawa, whose life was a series of personal reverses, Kenji Goto was a widely respected journalist in Japan, who set up his TV production company, Independent Press, in 1996, to cover conflicts, refugees, poverty, AIDS, and children's education. Yukawa, despite having no experience or military background, set himself up as a private military contractor in January, 2014, telling Kimoto the venture would guard Japanese ships. Unable to sell his services to Japanese shipping companies, Yukawa decided there was business to be had bringing medicine and ambulances to the Free Syrian Army, and providing bodyguard service to journalists like Goto. "I was afraid something like this would happen eventually," Shintaro Kimoto, an acquaintance of hostage Haruna Yukawa, told the Asahi Shimbun newspaper. Yukawa apparently re-entered Syria in July. “I had been worried that he would end up like this one day,” Kimoto said.
– Japan says it's exercising every diplomatic channel in the wake of ISIS' video threat to kill two Japanese hostages, emphasizing that the funds it's contributing to the international effort against the group are "not aimed at killing Muslims … and that [ISIS] shouldn't harm the two Japanese men," per Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said yesterday that the country wouldn't abandon plans to provide the money, which he said is intended to provide food and medicine for people affected by the crisis, the Wall Street Journal reports. Suga responded to questions about whether a $200 million ransom would be paid by saying that Japan wouldn't submit to terrorists. But Japan will "exert its utmost to secure the men's release," he said. Japan is also sending a counterterror team to Jordan as it investigates the video, CBS News reports. Hostage Haruna Yukawa sought to become a military contractor without any experience in the field, CBS notes, via Japan's Asahi Shimbun. When a friend warned him about working in Syria, he said he was "alone in the world, so even if I die, it doesn't matter." Fellow hostage Kenji Goto, a journalist, made it his life's work "to cover children in conflict-torn regions with a hope to convey to the world the harsh realities that those marginalized children are facing," a friend tells Asahi Shimbun. For more on their story, click here.