He is 67 years old. The ocean has beaten his skin but not his spirit. Thirteen years have passed since his wife, Yuko, went missing in the tsunami that hit north eastern beaches of Onagawa in Japan, in 2011. This is the story of Yasuo Takamatsu.
“Are you okay? I want to go home,” were the last words Takamatsu heard from Yuko. A message that has pushed him to continue looking for her to this day, 13 years later – he just wants to bring her home.
A recent video clip posted on social media by Mothership, a digital media company, telling the story of Takamatsu, has gone viral, leaving netizens in tears.
Takamatsu lost contact with his wife Yuko in 2011 who was working at a bank when the tsunami hit. He was dropping his mother-in-law off, in a nearby town at that time. When he heard news that someone from the bank had washed up ashore he went to check, but it wasn't her.
A month after the tsunami, Takamatsu came across her phone that was found at the bank. He found the last message she sent him, saying she wanted to go home. This was what drove him to continue his search for her. For two and a half years, he looked on land for her.
In a 2023 documentary titled ‘The Diver’ by US director Anderson Wright, Takamatsu is heard saying, “I searched around the rubble for her belongings. I thought maybe, she would be there.”
Takamatsu mentions how he looked through shelters, mountains and morgues too, just to bring her back home. It was in 2013, Takamatsu then 56, decided to look through the sea. He began diving lessons with the help of an instructor named Masayoshi Takahashi, who leads volunteer diving for missing tsunami victims.
At first Takamatsu helped with debris cleaning, but he never stopped looking for Yuko. Takahashi helped him by keeping track of the places Takamatsu already looked at.
Their story was adapted into a book titled ‘I want to go home’, which was then adapted into a feature film and was selected for the Busan International Film Festival (BIFF) in 2017. Besides ‘The Diver’, the true story was made into another documentary titled ‘Nowhere To Go But Everywhere (2022)’.
In the documentaries, Takamatsu says, “I expected it to be difficult. And I’ve found it quite difficult, but it is the only thing I can do. I have no choice but to keep looking for her. I feel closest to her in the ocean.”
“When I think somewhere in this ocean my wife exists… I have to go find her,” he says in the documentary ‘Nowhere To Go But Everywhere’.
Now, 67, he continues to search for her and has completed over 600 dives. The earthquake in 2011, that lead to the devastating tsunami resulted in the deaths of over 20,000 people, and more than 2,500 remain missing.
