video purportedly released by the Islamic State on Saturday appeared to show the beheading of Kenji Goto, a Japanese journalist whom militants had captured in Syria and held hostage. The death of Goto came one week after ISIS executed Haruna Yukawa, a fellow Japanese citizen who had traveled to Syria as a private security contractor. The two murders followed ISIS demands for $200 million in ransom from the Japanese government, as well as for the release of Sajida Mubarak al-Rishawi, a woman imprisoned in Jordan for her role in a 2005 failed suicide bombing.
Goto's kidnapping elicited much interest in Japan. Since Taku Nishimae, a New York-based Japanese filmmaker, launched a Facebook page entitled "I am Kenji Goto"—an homage to the "Je Suis Charlie" campaign that followed the Charlie Hebdo attacks—nearly 25,000 people have "liked" the page. Over 1,000 people have posted photographs of themselves showing solidarity with Kenji on the page.
The outpouring of sympathy for Goto was unusual in a country that traditionally shuns citizens caught up in dangerous conflicts. But Kenji Goto was not an ordinary citizen. As a journalist, Goto traveled across war-torn countries like Liberia, Iraq, and Kosovo, producing documentaries with his own money that showed daily life in the world's worst conflict zones. In a moving post written for the Committee to Project Journalists on Friday, The Economist's Heny Tricks described Goto's approach to covering war: