Yasuo has been searching for Yuko for over a decade (Picture: AFP)
‘Are you OK? I want to go home.’
Those were the last words Yuko Takamatsu, 47, sent her husband Yasuo on March 11, 2011, when a catastrophic tsunami slammed into Japan’s coast.
She would never be seen again, having been swept off of the top of her office building in Onagawa. She’s among the 2,523 people whose bodies have never been recovered.
Yuko was working at a local bank when the employees climbed to the roof, which was 30 feet high. The tsunami had been expected to be 10 feet – it reached over 60 feet where Yuko was.
It’s been 13 years since Yuko disappeared, and her husband has embarked on a mission to find his wife’s body.
Yasuo began scuba diving to search for Yuko in the murky ocean near where she disappeared.
He became scuba certified to better search for Yuko (Picture: AFP)
He’s conducted hundreds of dives off of Japan’s coast in an effort to find his wife, vowing to give her a proper burial.
Though he’s found relics from homes and people who lived – photo albums, clothes and jewelry – he hasn’t found his wife.
Yasuo learned to dive from his instructor Masayoshi Takahashi, who works to clean up debris from the tsunami underwater.
He had found bodies locked inside of cars and drifting through the water before, so Yasuo thought Takahashi would be a good option to help him begin searching.
For more than a decade, the pair go out and brave the icy waters to search, and search, and search.
Yasuo told the New York Times: ‘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.’
Yasuo dives regularly to search for his wife (Picture: AP)
In the decade after the harrowing tsunami and earthquake in 2011, other survivors have recounted bumping into ghosts of the dead.
In Ishinomaki alone, a city some 93 miles north of the Fukushima nuclear plant, around 6,000 people died in the tsunami.
In months following the disaster, rumours began to spread among the city’s cabbies over ghost passengers riding a taxi before disappearing.
Kiyoshi Kanebishi, professor of sociology at Tohoku Gakuin University who has studied the phenomenon of supernatural experiences of the survivors, said the ‘most believable’ sightings came from taxi drivers ‘because there were physical records connected to their sightings’.
A driver told him of a strangely dressed male passenger donning a thick coat in the August heat.
The driver switched on his meter, but he ‘felt there was something strange about the passenger’, Kanebishi said.
‘By the time they had arrived, the sun had already set. When he looked back the passenger had disappeared.
‘There were several taxi drivers with similar experiences.’
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