The news of that day has passed, but its meaning remains with us today. "That Day in History" reads the present through the records of the past.
On the night of June 8, 2023, Yoon Se-jun, a 26-year-old South Korean man, vanished without a trace while walking along a pitch-dark coastal road in Kushimoto, Wakayama Prefecture, Japan.
Yoon had planned a month-long backpacking trip across Japan before changing jobs, entering the country through Kansai International Airport on May 9. Starting in Fukuoka, he traveled alone for nearly a month, passing through Kitakyushu, Shimonoseki, Osaka, Nara and Kyoto before reaching Wakayama Prefecture. His return home was imminent.
His movements on the day of his disappearance are recorded in detail. After taking a bus from downtown Kushimoto, Yoon had dinner at the Sandoria restaurant at 6:20 p.m., then boarded a Shionomisaki-Izumo line bus at 6:58 p.m.
He got off at the Shionomisaki Kyoku-mae stop at 7:20 p.m. and spoke with his older sister for 27 minutes while walking along a dark mountain road with no sidewalk. During the call, Yoon said "the bus does not go all the way to the lodging," that "the road is dark and there is no sidewalk," and mentioned that he saw a vending machine along the way.
He ended the call with the words "I'll be there in 10 minutes," and the last contact was a KakaoTalk message sent to his sister at 9:33 p.m. reading, "Hey, take it easy~."
But Yoon never checked into any lodging. All accommodations within a 1.5-hour radius were searched, but no trace was found. The following day, June 9, his last GPS location was recorded in a forest near the rocky shore of Kii-Oshima Island.
His destination was never identified. The production team of "Unanswered Questions" speculated that Yoon, who had found a lodging with a beautiful night view on Kii-Oshima, went missing while walking toward the island.
In contrast, based on the content of the call with his sister, another interpretation emerged that he had not boarded the wrong bus but was traveling to an entirely different lodging a 1.5-hour walk away. The fact that the color of the bus route he boarded had changed that day also added to the confusion. His route could have been checked through Google Timeline, but access was impossible because he was not automatically logged in.
The leading presumed cause of death is a fatal fall. The waters off Kushimoto consist of terrain mixing near-pitch-black night roads with rocky shores. According to local residents, one or two maritime accidents occur there each year, and in most cases the bodies are never found.
Around 9 p.m. on the night of his disappearance, heavy rain fell at a rate of 10 mm per hour, and visibility was only 2.5 km. According to a marine expert's analysis, if he had fallen, there is a high probability that he was carried out to the Pacific Ocean by the Kuroshio Current.
Japanese police shifted to a public manhunt and even mobilized a helicopter, but failed to find his whereabouts. Criticism poured in after it was belatedly revealed that location tracking had not effectively been carried out after the missing-person report was filed.
In August 2023, SBS's "Unanswered Questions" aired the case, focusing on the flaws in the search and the absence of a missing-person investigation system within the Japanese police. Yoon Se-jun remains missing to this day.
