Friends and colleagues had warned Kenji Goto and Haruna Yukawa to avoid the danger zones in Syria. Goto, a veteran war journalist, even advised the inexperienced Yukawa to stay away from the area. 
 
 Now, the same friends and colleagues are praying for the safe release of Goto, 47, and Yukawa, 42, from the clutches of the Islamic State extremist group. In a video posted online on Jan. 20, a man wielding a knife and standing over the two kneeling Japanese men threatened to kill the hostages unless the Japanese government pays a ransom of $200 million (23.58 billion yen) in 72 hours. 
 
 The two men, who met in a different hostage situation in Syria in April 2014, both dismissed the warnings and entered the war-torn country for different reasons. 
 
 Yukawa told a colleague he was pursuing business opportunities in Syria. Goto entered the area controlled by the Islamic State in October for first-hand coverage, a task he has done for years to shed light on the plight of the innocent victims of conflicts. 
 
 “It has been Goto’s life work to cover children in conflict-torn regions with a hope to convey to the world the harsh realities that those marginalized children are facing,” said Kazumasa Ito, a high school teacher from Toyota, Aichi Prefecture, who has been Goto’s friend for the past decade or so. 
 
 In an e-mail sent to Ito on Oct. 22, Goto, the operator of the video news agency Independent Press, said he would make an overseas trip and return to Japan on the morning of Oct. 29. 
 
 That was the last contact Ito had with the journalist. 
 
 Ito said that he had asked Goto to give a lecture to children in Japan at the end of October titled, “What is happening to children in the world? The reality I saw from reporting from the front line of conflicts.” 
 
 A Syrian man who has accompanied Goto during his news-gathering activities in the Middle East country said the journalist told him that he planned to enter the area controlled by the Islamic State when they last met on Oct. 24. The Syrian tried to discourage Goto, saying it was too dangerous. 
 
 But Goto insisted on visiting the area and mentioned that he had personal connections to ensure his safety, according to the Syrian. 
 
 Around the same time, Goto sent a column via e-mail to the online news site Christian Today. Based on his experiences in the Iraq War, he wrote about an invisible boundary between soldiers and civilians in combat zones, saying there is no guarantee for life when the latter steps over that line. 
 
 After working in the TV production industry, Goto, a native of Sendai, established Independent Press in Tokyo’s Minato Ward in 1996. 
 
 Freelance journalist Takeharu Watai, the 43-year-old co-founder of the company, said Goto has covered battlefields and conflict zones with camcorders since the mid-1990s. 
 
 “I admired him for his bold efforts to gather news in Syria in recent years,” Watai said. 
 
 Goto has also contributed to campaigns by the Japan Committee for UNICEF to raise awareness of children’s rights around the world. 
 
 “He has made consistent efforts to uncover and report the realities of children who are denied the opportunity to attend school or are forced to become soldiers in developing countries and conflict-plagued areas,” said Hiromasa Nakai, the organization’s spokesman. “I humbly pray for his safe return home.” 
 
 In April last year, Goto met Yukawa, who established a private military company called PMC in January 2014. Yukawa was being detained by the Free Syrian Army (FSA), an armed opposition group, in northern Syria. 
 
 According to Nobuo Kimoto, a 70-year-old former Ibaraki prefectural assembly member and adviser to PMC, Yukawa was released thanks largely to Goto, who had connections with FSA members. The journalist translated Yukawa's words to explain that he had no purpose in Syria other than to acquire on-field experience. 
 
 After returning to Japan, Yukawa told Kimoto about Goto, saying he found a good connection for business opportunities in Syria. 
 
 Yukawa also told acquaintances that he received a request from an FSA general to supply medical goods and an ambulance to the group. 
 
 Kimoto tried to discourage Yukawa from revisiting Syria. Goto has said he also urged Yukawa not to enter the conflict zones, considering his lack of experience. 
 
 But according to Kimoto, Yukawa noted that he was not married and was not afraid of dying. 
 
 Yukawa apparently re-entered Syria in July. He is believed to have been captured by the Islamic State in August. 
 
 “I had been worried that he would end up like this one day,” Kimoto said. 
 
 Yukawa’s father, Shoichi, told reporters at the family’s residence in Chiba on Jan. 20 that he cannot comment on the hostage crisis because he was concentrating on all the information coming in about his son’s situation. ||||| TOKYO—Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said Wednesday that his government will use every possible diplomatic channel to secure the release of two Japanese hostages held by Islamic extremists. 
 
 A video posted on a YouTube channel used by Islamic State’s publishing arm Tuesday showed a masked man with a knife threatening to kill two kneeling Japanese men unless the government paid a $200 million ransom within 72 hours. 
 
 The... ||||| TOKYO -- The Japanese government has verified the identities of the two hostages held by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) after consulting with the victims' families, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said Wednesday, adding that Tokyo would "exert its utmost to secure the men's release." 
 
 Historically pacifist and heavily dependent on Mideast oil, contemporary Japan has reiterated that its aid to the Mideast nations and their allies battling ISIS was humanitarian in nature, and meant to promote the stability of the region. 
 
 "We have been aggressively contributing, for the sake of peace and to improve the welfare of the people of the Mideast," Suga said. "Japan's aid is absolutely not being used to kill Muslims, as claimed by these brutal criminals." 
 
 In a video released Tuesday, ISIS demanded $200 million in exchange for the lives of the two men, and accused Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe directly of donating "$100 million to kill our women and children, to destroy the homes of the Muslims ... and in an attempt to stop the expansion of the Islamic State, you have also donated another $100 million to train the (apostates)." 
 
 "We will not yield to terrorism, and there is no change to our position of contributing to campaigns against terror in international society," Suga said Wednesday, reiterating remarks made immediately after the video surfaced. 
 
 Japan has been at pains to emphasize that the aid announced in recent days is strictly non-military in nature. 
 
 The widely circulated Asahi Shimbun newspaper said the ransom demand was more than four-times the amount of money extorted by ISIS in exchange for hostages over the past year. 
 
 Japan's National Police Agency, meanwhile, said it was dispatching a counter-terrorism team, activated when Japanese citizens are abducted overseas, to Amman, Jordan. The government was also analyzing the hostage video itself -- shadows on the victims' faces and discrepancies in the way the wind is blowing their garments indicate the video may be doctored. 
 
 Japan is renowned for its low crime rate. Japanese police do not carry firearms and the self-defense forces are not considered an actual military. Its remote location has largely isolated it from the terrorism that has plagued Western countries in recent years, and naiveté and miscalculations by both of the hostages apparently played a role in their abduction. 
 
 "I was afraid something like this would happen eventually," Shintaro Kimoto, an acquaintance of hostage Haruna Yukawa, told the Asahi Shimbun newspaper. 
 
 Yukawa, despite having no experience or military background, set himself up as a private military contractor in January, 2014, telling Kimoto the venture would guard Japanese ships. 
 
 In April he went by himself to Syria, saying on his blog that he wanted to "record everything that happens in a war zone." 
 
 At the time, he was training with members of the U.S.-backed Free Syrian Army rebels in northern Syria. 
 
 "I came to get experience for my military contracting," he said. There, he met journalist Kenji Goto, who warned him, "if you identify yourself as a military contractor in a combat area, you'll be marked as an enemy." 
 
 Yukawa returned to Japan. He expressed excitement over having had the chance to fire a gun -- something impossible in Japan, where strict laws forbid ordinary citizens from owning firearms. 
 
 Unable to sell his services to Japanese shipping companies, Yukawa decided there was business to be had bringing medicine and ambulances to the Free Syrian Army, and providing bodyguard service to journalists like Goto. 
 
 Kimoto said he told him the venture was too dangerous, to which Yukawa, a widower, replied, "I'm alone in the world, so even if I die, it doesn't matter." He returned to Syria in July. 
 
 In mid-August, a YouTube video appeared, showing Yukawa being interrogated, his head bleeding. 
 
 Swarmed by media in front of his home in Chiba city yesterday, Yukawa's father, Shoichi, said only: "My mind is confusion, I can't do interviews," and then he left. 
 
 Unlike Yukawa, whose life was a series of personal reverses, Kenji Goto was a widely respected journalist in Japan, who set up his TV production company, Independent Press, in 1996, to cover conflicts, refugees, poverty, AIDS, and children's education. He had traveled repeatedly to Syria and was a prime source of reports from that area in the Japanese language media. 
 
 Akira Ikegami, a leading journalist in Tokyo who had relied on Goto's expertise while producing a story on the Iraq war, praised him as a "veteran of combat reporting" and expressed shock over his abduction. 
 
 Goto, Ikegami told various Japanese media, "tried to get across the tragedy of conflict. I am worried about him." 
 
 Yet despite his experience working in war zones, Goto failed to heed warnings on his most recent trip. 
 
 A Syrian guide interviewed in southern Turkey by several Japanese TV networks described how Goto tried to hire him for a trip into ISIS-held territory to search for Yukawa and report on civilian life under the militants' control. 
 
 The guide took him from Kiris, Turkey, to the battlefront city of Aleppo in northern Syria, but refused to escort him to Raqqa, the de-facto capital of ISIS' territory, saying that foreign journalists were prime targets. 
 
 The guide said Goto felt his nationality would shield him from harm. 
 
 Goto's wife received an email, apparently from ISIS militants, demanding $17 million in ransom in December, according to Japanese broadcaster NHK. 
 
 ISIS' well-documented social-media savvy was evident, according to the Japanese edition of Huffington Post, in their use of Twitter. 
 
 In an effort to disseminate their video as far and fast as possible in Japan on Tuesday, the captors tweeted a link using unrelated Japanese-language hashtags that happened to be trending at the time: "Hitoshi Saito," a deceased judo champ; "coldest period of winter," and "snow crab," among others. 
 
 As the news began to generate tweets in Japan, key phrases in Japanese, like "236 million yen," (the ransom amount in Japanese currency) and "within 72 hours," were copied and pasted into new hashtags, ensuring the news' quick spread.
– Japan says it's exercising every diplomatic channel in the wake of ISIS' video threat to kill two Japanese hostages, emphasizing that the funds it's contributing to the international effort against the group are "not aimed at killing Muslims … and that [ISIS] shouldn't harm the two Japanese men," per Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said yesterday that the country wouldn't abandon plans to provide the money, which he said is intended to provide food and medicine for people affected by the crisis, the Wall Street Journal reports. Suga responded to questions about whether a $200 million ransom would be paid by saying that Japan wouldn't submit to terrorists. But Japan will "exert its utmost to secure the men's release," he said. Japan is also sending a counterterror team to Jordan as it investigates the video, CBS News reports. Hostage Haruna Yukawa sought to become a military contractor without any experience in the field, CBS notes, via Japan's Asahi Shimbun. When a friend warned him about working in Syria, he said he was "alone in the world, so even if I die, it doesn't matter." Fellow hostage Kenji Goto, a journalist, made it his life's work "to cover children in conflict-torn regions with a hope to convey to the world the harsh realities that those marginalized children are facing," a friend tells Asahi Shimbun. For more on their story, click here.