Yasuo Takamatsu Has Dived More Than 760 Times for Wife Yuko as Japan Still Counts 2,519 Tsunami Missing

Yasuo Takamatsu has dived more than 760 times into the sea off Onagawa, Japan, looking for his wife, Yuko. The 2011 tsunami swept her away, and nobody has ever found her body. He was still diving this year, when the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) World Service recorded one of his dives for the 10 July programme.

The latest National Police Agency figures put the number of people still missing from the disaster at 2,519. Families like Takamatsu's have waited more than 15 years with no body to bury. Yuko's last email to her husband, as he recalled it to the Associated Press in 2014, read: 'Are you OK? I want to go home.'

What Happened at the Bank in Onagawa

Yuko, the mother of a son and a daughter, worked at the Onagawa branch of The 77 Bank, Ltd. A magnitude 9.0 earthquake struck on 11 March 2011, and she and her colleagues climbed onto the roof of the two-storey building. A memorial at the site says the water reached the roof about half an hour later. Only one of the 13 people there survived, according to court rulings in Sendai.

Takamatsu searched shelters, hospitals, and rubble on land for more than two years. Yuko's mobile phone turned up near the bank about a month after the disaster, and he found an unsent message on it saying the tsunami was huge. Then her husband looked to the sea. In 2013, the former military plane mechanic began diving lessons with Masayoshi Takahashi, whose volunteer divers were recovering belongings, and sometimes bones, from the seabed in 2014.

How the Search Became a Way To Visit Yuko

His search has drawn filmmakers to Onagawa before. Singaporean director Wesley Leon Aroozoo spent a week with him in June 2015 for a book and a 60-minute documentary, both called I Want to Go Home. 'Mr. Takamatsu has moved my heart,' Aroozoo told the Singapore culture site Popspoken in 2018. Filmmaker Anderson Wright followed in March 2023 with The Diver, an eight-minute short. The film below includes seabed footage from underwater camera operator Masahiko Sakata.

The BBC documentary, presented by Jake Warren, links Takamatsu's dives to kuyo, a Buddhist tradition of memorial offerings for the dead. In the programme's English translation, Takamatsu told the broadcaster that a dive differs from a trip to a grave, because Yuko is not in one. 'It feels more like going to meet her,' he said. Diving again and again has left him feeling that she might be close by, he added.

What Happens Next for Japan's Missing

Police conducted another intensive search on 11 March 2026, the 15th anniversary. Identifications continue. In October 2025, authorities identified remains from Minamisanriku, a town in Miyagi, as belonging to a girl from Yamada in neighbouring Iwate. She was six when the tsunami struck, and she had been missing ever since.

Another 53 sets of remains still await identification. In 2014, Takamatsu told the Associated Press that he wanted to do the looking himself instead of leaving it to others. Nine years later, in Wright's film, he said he would keep searching for as long as his body allowed.