Widower qualified as a search diver so he could keep looking for his dead wife
JAPAN
THE middle-aged man in a diving suit sinking into the chilly waters off north-east Japan is not an underwater photographer or wreck enthusiast, and he has no particular interest in the grey-blue fish that dart through the cold Pacific waters. Yasuo Takamatsu, a quietly-spoken bus driver, is looking for his wife.
Three years ago this month, Yuko Takamatsu, a 47-year-old mother of two, was working at the bank in the fishing port of Onagawa when a 15 metre tsunami destroyed three-quarters of the town. More than 800 of its 10,000 inhabitants died, and in the days and months that followed, 569 of their bodies were recovered.
However, despite repeated searches, a third of Onagawa’s dead have never been found. Yuko is among them, which is why Takamatsu qualified as a search diver. He spends several chilly afternoons a month with a team of searchers devoted to a task long ago abandoned by the authorities – to find and bury the remains of 2636 people still missing nationwide from Japan’s worst post-war disaster.
Superficially, remarkably little progress has been made since a magnitude 9 earthquake struck the seabed off north-east Japan, generating a series of waves as high as 20 metres. About 100,000 people have no permanent homes – just the grim pre-fabricated huts that have been erected across the disaster zone.
The towns and
villages where
Yuko Takamatsu has not rested in the search for his wife’s body since the 2011 tsunami swept her away. 18,800 people died are overgrown by vegetation and new zoning laws mean that few of them will ever be rebuilt, except as places of business.
The Takamatsus lived in a house above the reach of the wave, and their two children are grown up and living away from home. So the life of Takamatsu, a calm, undemonstrative man of 57, is now wholly devoted to finding his dead wife.
‘‘I feel that we didn’t do all we could for her,’’ he says. ‘‘And I don’t know what to do with my feelings.’’
Yuko had worked in the bank since she left school, and after the tsunami, Takamatsu was not anxious about her. ‘‘She sent me a text message after the earthquake, saying, ‘Are you OK? I want to come home’, he says. ‘‘And I knew that behind the bank, literally a three-minute walk away, was a hill where they would be completely safe.’’
The next day he met a friend who described what many people had seen from the higher land, and which was recounted by the single survivor among the bank’s 13 staff.
Yuko Takamatsu ‘‘I collapsed,’’ says Takamatsu. Instead of climbing the hill, the bank manager ordered his staff to the flat roof of the 10-metre high building.
The waters rose, and everyone was washed away.
Takamatsu is haunted by the message his wife sent moments before she died. ‘‘I know how she felt,’’ he says. ‘‘She wrote ‘I want to come home’, and I must bring her home.’’
The volunteer searchers with whom he dives have so far recovered the remains of just 10 people.