Man whose wife was lost in tsunami spent more than a decade diving every week in hopes of finding her remains

A man whose wife is thought to have died in the Japanese tsunami in 2011 has spent over a decade searching for her body.

Yasuo Takamatsu has spent more than ten years looking for his wife Yuko's remains in order to lay her to rest.

The search began after the Japan tsunami in 2011 which affected the area of Fukushima. Now in the years since, Takamatsu dives weekly and has done for over a decade to see if he can find her body.

Fukushima was devastated by the tsunami in March 2011. (Aeon)

The tsunami that hit Japan on March 11 2011 had a magnitude of 9.1 and was the worst to ever hit the country and the fourth most devastating in human history.

The event left 450,000 people homeless as a result, alongside 18,000 dead. More than 2,500 people are still 'missing' after the tsunami, with their bodies never found.

For Takamatsu, his wife was one of the many who was washed away after the tsunami hit while she was at work in a bank. Takamatsu, who had been with his mother-in-law at a hospital in the next town at the time, was not allowed to return the wrecked town after the tsunami hit.

Months after the tsunami hit, he found his wife's phone in the parking lot of the bank where she worked but has not found anything else since.

Since 2011 Takamatsu has been searching for his wife Yuko, and he began diving in 2013. (Aeon)

The phone contained both Yuko's last message to her husband, as well as an unsent one. Her last message read: "Are you okay? I want to go home."

In her unsent message she tried to tell her husband about the devastation of the tsunami as she wrote out: "The tsunami is disastrous."

Despite various searches, there has been little other clue of where Yuko's body could be but Takamatsu holds out hope.

After searching on land for two and a half years, the then-56-year-old started taking diving lessons in September 2013. While he didn't find learning to dive easy, the devoted husband has explained that he's motivated by wanting to find her body.

Takamatsu worries that the "ocean is way too vast" and he may never find her. (Aeon)

In an interview for short film 'The Diver', Takamatsu explained: "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."

Takamatsu dives alongside the help of a diving instructor, Masayoshi Takahashi. Takahashi leads volunteer dives to look for missing tsunami victims and has been helping Takamatsu as he continues the search for his wife's body.