Japanese man goes diving every week to find body of wife who went missing during 2011 tsunami

March 2011 was the last time that Yasuo Takamatsu heard from his wife, Yuko.

It was the month of the Great East Japan Earthquake, the fourth most powerful earthquake ever recorded and the strongest to hit Japan, which caused a tsunami.

The destruction resulted in around 450,000 people losing their homes, over 18,000 people losing their lives and more than 2,500 people being listed as missing since their bodies were never found.

The tsunami also caused the Fukushima nuclear disaster.

In the chaos and destruction, Yuko was one of the people who was washed away, with the tsunami hitting when she was at work at a bank.

She'd sent her husband an email saying: "Are you OK? I want to go home."

It was the last he ever heard of her.

Yasuo Takamatsu has been diving for more than a decade to search for his missing wife. (TORU YAMANAKA/AFP via Getty Images)

Takamatsu had been in the next town over with his mother-in-law in a hospital that day, and due to the destruction, he couldn't return to look for his wife in the immediate aftermath of the disaster.

He would begin the search for his wife's remains on land, with her phone being found in the bank's car park months after the tsunami hit.

It had an unsent text saying 'the tsunami is disastrous' which had been written at 3:25pm local time but the message had never been delivered.

He knew his wife had been alive at that time to write those words, but afterwards there as no trace of her.

After searching for two-and-a-half years on land, he shifted his explorations to the sea, taking diving lessons in September 2013 so he could learn to explore the sea.

Ever since then, he's gone diving every week to look for clues of the whereabouts of his wife's body.

He's gone diving over 600 times to look for his wife in the past decade. (TORU YAMANAKA/AFP via Getty Images)

"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 in the short film The Diver.

He doesn't dive down alone, he takes his regular plunges into the sea with diving instructor Masayoshi Takahashi, who leads volunteer dives into the water to help look for missing tsunami victims.

Search operations for the over 2,500 people who went missing during the 2011 disaster are still ongoing, though at a smaller scale than previously.

Takamatsu had met his wife in 1988 when he was working in the Japanese military, but when the disaster struck, he was working as a bus driver and in the past decade, he has made more than 600 dives.