Japanese man diving every week to find wife lost in 2011 tsunami

In March 2011, Yasuo Takamatsu last heard from his wife, Yuko. That month, the Great East Japan Earthquake happened. It was the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan and the fourth strongest in the world. This earthquake caused a terrible tsunami.

Nearly 450,000 people were left without homes, with more than 18,000 people dead and over 2,500 still missing, their bodies not found. Yuko is one of these missing; she was a person who was carried by the tsunami while she was working at the bank.

Shortly before the disaster, Yuko sent an e-mail to her husband that said: “Are you OK? I want to go home”. That was the last message Yasuo ever received from her. On that fateful day, Yasuo himself was in a nearby town, at a hospital with his mother-in-law. The serious damage stopped him from going back and finding his wife right after the disaster.

Months later, Yasuo started roaming the land searching for Yuko and found her cell phone in the bank’s parking parking lot. Inside the cell phone was an unsent message: “The tsunami is disastrous.” The timestamp was 3:25 PM local time. That message never sent, proving she was alive to that time, but from then on, the phone went silent.

For two and a half years, Yasuo roamed the land. He believes Yuko is likely still out there, somewhere in the sea. So he began taking diving lessons in September 2013, to look for her remains. And since then he’s been diving every week, always on the lookout for her.

In a quote from the short film The Diver, Yasuo said, “I want to find her, but I also feel she might never be found because the ocean is too big – but I have to keep searching.”.

He is not doing it by himself.  Yasuo is accompanied by diving instructor Masayoshi Takahashi, who spearheads dives joined by volunteers to search for missing tsunami victims.  Almost a decade after the incident, while almost 2,500 people who went missing when the calamity hit in 2011 have been searched, compared to then, the activities now are considerably less.

He had known Yuko since 1988. At that time, he was serving in the Japanese military, while at the time of disaster, he was a bus driver. Since the incidence happened ten years ago, Yasuo has done more than 600 dives in search of his beloved wife.

Source: ladbible.com