Body of missing British teacher Alice Hodgkinson found in Japan
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The body of a British teacher in Japan has been found eight days after she was reported missing.
Alice Hodgkinson, 28, from Nottingham, was reported missing on 1 July after she did not attend work at an English language school in Tokyo.
Police in Japan are not looking for anyone in connection with her death, which is being treated as suicide, according to her family.
The location where her body was found has not been disclosed, and her family said they want to repatriate her body as soon as possible.
Ms Hodgkinson’s father, Stephen, a retired computer software engineer, said that the family were “at a complete loss” after receiving the “worst news imaginable” from police in Japan, and that her mother, Julie, an NHS worker, is “beside herself with grief”.
He last spoke to Ms Hodgkinson on 30 June via Skype and said there was “no indication that anything was wrong”. He had previously said that the pair spoke “pretty regularly”.
Police in Japan have said that they visited Ms Hodgkinson’s apartment and had to break down the door to enter. They did not find her there but they found a note addressed to her father and her brother.
The contents of the note have not been disclosed. At the time her father had told The Guardian that the note left to the family had indicated she may have been “in a distressed state”.
Ms Hodgkinson, who graduated from Edinburgh University with a master’s degree in psychology, moved to Japan in March last year.
She had been living in the city of Yokohama, Japan’s second-most populous city, which is around 20 miles south of Tokyo. She had commuted to the capital to teach at a school run by the British-owned chain Shane English Schools.
The school alerted her father to her disappearance last week after she had not turned up to work for a few days.
Her brother Peter had made missing posters for people to share on social media.
At the time of her disappearance, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office had said that it was working with authorities in Japan.
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