Japanese citizens will join an arduous search for a missing American who vanished in a mountainous forest

By Hanako Montgomery, Holly Yan, CNN (CNN) — One stranger from Tokyo is shutting down his business for a week to help. Another volunteer dropped everything to provide transportation and translations for American parents desperate to find their son. The weeklong quest to find James “Weston” Higginbotham has yielded no signs of the 20-year-old. Now,