‘Lost At Sea, Not Forgotten’: Husband Still Searches For Wife 13 Years After Japan Tsunami

A Japanese man still continues searching for his wife even more than a decade after she died in the devastating tsunami in 2011. In an effort to perform the last rites properly for her wife, Yuko, a Japanese man Yasuo Takamatsu has been looking for her remains for more than ten years.

The search began following the 2011 Japan disaster, which devastated the Fukushima region. Since then, Takamatsu has been diving once a week for more than ten years trying to locate the remains of his wife.

In the devastating 2011 tsunami nearly 20,000 people were reportedly killed and over 2,500 went missing.

Japan was struck by the fourth most catastrophic tsunami in human history on March 11, 2011, with a magnitude of 9.1, making it the deadliest tsunami to ever strike the nation.

According to the Metro report, Yuko was employed at a nearby bank when the staff ascended to the thirty-foot-high roof. The waves under the impact of the tsunami reached a height of 60 feet.

Yasuo started scuba diving in the murky waters close to Yuko’s disappearance site to look for her remains.

According to the report, he has made hundreds of dives off the coast of Japan in an attempt to locate his wife and has pledged to bury her properly.

Masayoshi Takahashi, a volunteer who cleans up tsunami debris underwater, taught Yasuo how to dive.

Yasuo believed Takahashi would be a suitable choice to assist him in beginning the search since he had previously discovered dead drifting through the ocean and confined inside of vehicles.

The two had been searching valiantly in the frigid seas for almost ten years.

He discovered his wife’s phone in the bank parking lot where she worked months after the tsunami struck, but he hasn’t recovered anything else since.

Yuko left her husband a message on the phone, one that was not transmitted and the other that was her last. Her final text message was, “Are you okay? I want to go home.”

She attempted to inform her husband of the tsunami’s impact in her unsent message, writing, “The tsunami is disastrous.”

“I expected it to be difficult, and I’ve found it quite difficult, but it is the only thing I can do,” Yasuo stated in an interview with the New York Times.

“I have no choice but to keep looking for her. I feel closest to her in the ocean,” he said.