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 recovered from the ruins. It still worked, and Takamatsu found another unsent message to him: “The tsunami is huge.” He said he could not imagine how scared his wife must have been, and he was determined to fulfil her last wish and bring her home.
Takamatsu, who worked as a bus driver before he retired, used his free time to take scuba diving lessons and got his licence in 2014. He has been searching for Yuko ever since. Takamatsu said he knows Yuko will not be found alive, but he still wants to bring her home – even if it is only part of her body.
“Let’s go home together,” Takamatsu said in an interview, as though Yuko could hear him. He said he will continue searching as long as he is able to. The 2011 Great Tohoku Earthquake was the most powerful known to have hit Japan.
The disaster resulted in 19,759 deaths in the country. A total of 2,553 bodies are still missing, according to Miyagi prefecture’s official website..
