LOST IN FUKUSHIMA
Grieving husband trains as a diver & spends the last ten years scouring the ocean for wife lost in Japanese tsunami
A JAPANESE man trained as a diver to search for his missing wife who was lost in a tsunami ten years ago.
Yasuo Takamatsu, 64, lost his wife, Yuko, when the tsunami hit Onagawa, in 2011.
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He has been looking for her ever since.
Yasuo went as far as to get his diving license as part of his quest to find her remains.
He has gone for weekly solo dives for the past seven years, in his bid to locate her body.
“I’m always thinking that she may be somewhere nearby,” he said.
As well as his solo dives, Yasuo joined local authorities once a month, as they conducted underwater searches for some 2,500 people whose remains were still unaccounted for.
Yasuo said the city's scars had largely healed, but the recovery of people’s hearts would take time.
So far, the dedicated husband has found albums, clothes and other artifacts, but nothing that belonged to his wife.
Yasuo said the last message he received from his wife was asking him whether he was okay, and expressing that she wanted to “go home” from her job at a bank.
“I’m sure she still wants to come home,” he said.
Yasuo said he will keep searching for his wife as long as his "body moves".
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Terrifying 133ft waves smashed into the northeastern coast of the country, crashing into the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant.
More than 15,000 people died and nearly 230,000 were forced to flee for their lives during the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl.
The waves travelled at up to 700km/h, reaching 10km inland.
The quake caused $360billion (£168billion) in damage, making it the most expensive disaster in world history.
Yasuo had not been worried about his wife following the tsunami as the bank where she worked backed on to a hill where he thought she would be sheltering.
But the next day he was told that the bank’s staff had been ordered to head to the flat roof of the 10m-high building, instead of climbing the hill behind.
They had been washed away as the waters rose, with only one of the staff members surviving.
More than 800 of Onagawa’s 10,000 residents died, with 569 bodies recovered over the days and months that followed.
Yuko’s body was one of many - a third of those Onagawa residents suspected dead - which had never been found.
The life of Takamatsu, 57, was now entirely devoted to finding his dead wife.
"I feel that we didn't do all we could for her," he said.
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Remarkably little progress seemed to have been made in the town since a magnitude 9 earthquake struck the seabed off northeastern Japan, generating a series of immensely tall waves.
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Around 100,000 still lived in grim prefabricated huts that had been erected across the disaster zone.
The volunteer searchers with whom Takamatsu dives have so far recovered the remains of ten people.
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