In March 2011, Yasuo Takamatsu last heard from his wife, Yuko.
It was the month of the Great East Japan Earthquake—the fourth most powerful earthquake ever recorded and the most intense to strike Japan—which triggered a devastating tsunami.
The disaster caused approximately 450,000 people to lose their homes, claimed over 18,000 lives, and left more than 2,500 people unaccounted for, as their bodies were never found.
The tsunami also led to the Fukushima nuclear disaster.
In the midst of the chaos and destruction, Yuko was swept away by the tsunami while she was at work at a bank.
She had sent her husband an email that read: “Are you OK? I want to go home.”
That was the last message he ever received from her.
Takamatsu had been in the next town over with his mother-in-law at a hospital that day. Due to the widespread destruction, he was unable to return immediately to search for his wife in the aftermath of the disaster.
He began the search for his wife’s remains on land, and months after the tsunami, her phone was discovered in the bank’s car park.
The phone contained an unsent text that read, “The tsunami is disastrous,” written at 3:25 p.m. local time, but the message had never been delivered.
He knew his wife had been alive at that time to write those words, but afterward, there was no trace of her.
After searching on land for two and a half years, he turned his efforts to the sea. In September 2013, he began taking diving lessons to learn how to explore underwater.
Since then, he has gone diving every week in search of clues about his wife’s whereabouts.
“I want to find her, but the ocean is so vast that I worry she might never be discovered. Still, I have to keep searching,” he said in the short film The Diver.
He doesn’t dive alone; he regularly joins diving instructor Masayoshi Takahashi, who organizes volunteer dives to search for missing tsunami victims.
Search operations for the more than 2,500 people who went missing during the 2011 disaster are still ongoing, though on a smaller scale than before.
Takamatsu met his wife in 1988 while working in the Japanese military. By the time the disaster struck, he was working as a bus driver. Over the past decade, he has completed more than 600 dives.
