‘Act of true love’: Japanese man’s wife vanished in the 2011 tsunami. 15 years and 750 dives later, he has never stopped searching beneath the waves

A TikTok video from Daily Mail said Yasuo Takamatsu has spent nearly 15 years searching for his wife, Yuko, who disappeared when the 2011 tsunami swept through Onagawa, Japan. The long underwater effort has been called an “act of true love.”

After searching on land for more than two years, Takamatsu began scuba diving in 2013, the Daily Mail stated. He has since made more than 750 dives in the waters where she was last seen, according to the video.

He recovered Yuko’s phone from the parking lot of the bank where she worked, the post said. Her body was never found. Her final message to him asked: “Are you okay? I want to go home.” Takamatsu said he would keep searching as long as he is physically able and described each dive as a way of feeling close to her.

Volunteer searches continue in the waters off Onagawa

A 2022 Daily Mail report said Takamatsu was still diving every week 11 years after the disaster. An underwater earthquake off Japan’s east coast caused the Tōhoku tsunami on March 11, 2011, the report stated. It left nearly half a million people homeless and killed nearly 20,000. More than 2,500 people were still reported missing at that time.

Yuko was at work at the bank when the wave hit, according to the report. She had been clearing debris from the earlier earthquake when the tsunami swept through. Months after the disaster, her phone was found with an unsent message that read: “The tsunami is disastrous.”

Takamatsu, a bus driver, said the idea of surviving and not looking for his wife was “depressing.” He stated he would carry on searching on land and sea “as long as [his body] moves.” After two and a half years on land, he started diving lessons in September 2013, the report said. He was 56 at the time.

He told the outlet that he did not take to diving naturally, but that thinking about his wife had “driven” him into the water. “I do want to find her, but I also feel that she may never be discovered as the ocean is way too vast – but I have to keep looking,” he said.

During the dives, he wears a rubber dry suit and enters the cold water with instructor Masayoshi Takahashi, the report stated. Takahashi leads volunteer dives to look for missing tsunami victims and said he thought it was important to help Takamatsu search for his wife.

Takamatsu had been with his mother-in-law at a hospital in the next town when the tsunami struck. He was not allowed back into the wrecked town at first. When barriers were lifted the next day, he went to Onagawa’s hilltop hospital, the designated evacuation site.

There he learned the bank employees, including his wife, had been swept away. “I felt my knees buckling. I felt nothing in my body,” he said. Such long searches for lost loved ones or cherished items can span years, as a Minnesota man who spent a decade looking for his wedding ring lost in a lake.

The video shows Takamatsu in a wetsuit looking out, a photograph of Yuko smiling, and him rolling backward off a white boat in red fins toward a rocky coastline. For those searching for the missing, the passage of time can bring unexpected connections, as when a message in a bottle from two teens reached a North Carolina fisherman twelve years later.

Viewers offered mixed reactions under the TikTok post. One commenter said the search continues even though recovery may never happen: “He knows he will never find her. But if he stops then he loses her forever……”

Another suggested the dives themselves serve a purpose beyond recovery. They wrote, “I think diving makes him feel closer to her somehow.” One person simply wrote, “The definition of true love.”

Some commenters questioned whether the search should continue. One wrote, “I understand he loves her, but why can’t he just realize she’s gone?” Another stated, “He needs to let go and enjoy the rest of his life.”

A further comment raised practical doubts about identification after so many years: “How would he even identify her? She will be bones by this point and I’m sure there’s more than one skeleton if the Tsunami washed away multiple people.”