Best friend’s haunting final messages sent to student missing in Japan went unanswered: ‘I saw him as a brother’
A missing Auburn University student, James 'Weston' Higginbotham, vanished during a family trip to Japan. His best friend, Hiyu Shikari, shared their last text exchanges, expressing concern after failing to receive a response from Higginbotham. The search for Higginbotham has been hampered by severe weather conditions in the area where he was last seen.
- ▪Weston Higginbotham went missing during a family trip to Japan.
- ▪His last known location was in the Yamashina section of Kyoto, known for its dense forests.
- ▪Efforts to locate him have been complicated by Tropical Storm Jangmim, which brought severe weather to the region.
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| Original publisher | New York Post |
| Canonical URL | https://nypost.com/2026/06/05/us-news/best-friends-haunting-final-messages-sent-to-student-missing-in-japan-went-unanswered/ |
| Publication time | Fri, 05 Jun 2026 20:19:38 -0400 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-06-06T00:43:00.622Z |
| Last seen | 2026-06-06T00:43:00.622Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | V4NeFFWq2Gpn |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
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Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
US News Best friend’s haunting final messages sent to student missing in Japan went unanswered: ‘I saw him as a brother’ By Daniel Cody Published June 5, 2026, 8:19 p.m. ET See more of our coverage in your search results. Add The New York Post on Google The best friend of the missing Auburn University student who mysteriously vanished during a family trip to Japan revealed their haunting last text exchanges, shortly after the pair reunited in Tokyo. James “Weston” Higginbotham, 20, reconnected with Hiyu Shikari, 20, in Japan — they were close friends who attended the same middle school in the US before Shikari moved to the island around 2019.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at New York Post.
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