A Japanese man is continuing to search for the remains of his wife who is missing feared dead from a 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Yasuo Takamatsu, 67, hopes to fulfil a wish she made in her final text message to him: “I want to go home”. The dedicated husband has dived into the ocean more than 650 times at the location where his wife, Yuko, went missing, desperately hoping to find traces of her.
Takamatsu married Yuko in 1988. They lived in Onagawa in Miyagi prefecture, a coastal town 70km from the capital city Sendai. The couple had a son and a daughter.
On March 11, 2011, when the 9.0-magnitude earthquake and tsunami struck northeastern Japan, Takamatsu was driving back home from dropping his mother-in-law off at a hospital in a nearby city. He was not in danger.
His children, who were at school, both survived the disaster, but Yuko did not. She was working in the 77 Bank’s Onagawa branch, located in a two-storey building. The branch manager received an alert warning there would be a six-metre-high tsunami, so he evacuated 13 employees to the rooftop, which was nearly 10 metres above ground.
Tragically, a wave higher than 15 metres arrived and washed away 12 people. It was reported that eight people, including Yuko, were never found. Takamatsu said Yuko sent him a final text message as the disaster unfolded, in which she wrote: “Are you all right? I want to go home.
” Two years later, the rescue team gave Takamatsu his wife’s phone that they had recovere.