Yasuo Takamatsu, a 67-year-old Japanese man, is still looking for his wife Yuko, who disappeared after Japan’s earthquake and tsunami in 2011. Yuko told him in her last text message, “I want to go home.” In the time since Yuko went missing, Takamatsu has dove more than 650 times in the area to try to find her.
They got married in 1988 and lived in a town near Sendai called Onagawa. They had a boy and a girl. Japan was hit by a big earthquake and wave on March 11, 2011. Takamatsu was safe because he was on his way home from taking his mother-in-law to the hospital. His kids, who were at school, also made it out alive, but Yuko did not.
At the time, she worked in a bank. Yuko and some other workers tried to get away by going to the roof, but a huge wave more than 15 meters high swept them away. Yuko was one of eight people who were never found.
In her last message to her husband, Yuko asked if he was okay and told him she was leaving for home.
Rescuers found her phone two years later. It still worked, and there was a message on it that hadn’t been sent yet: “The tsunami is huge.” Takamatsu chose to look for her because he couldn’t picture how scared she must have been.
After Takamatsu quit his job as a bus driver, he learned to scuba dive and has been looking ever since. He knows he won’t be able to find Yuko living, but he still wants to bring her home. He keeps looking and says, “Let’s go home together,” as if she can hear him.
More than 2,500 people, including Yuko, are still missing after the 2011 Great Tohoku Earthquake. It killed 19,759 people.
