Diving for Yuko

0:00Jake Warren:This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

0:30business needs in one place, saving you time, headaches, and serious money. Stop paying for missing pieces. Go to odoo.com. That's O-D-O-O dot com to learn more. Self-directed investing, trading, full-service wealth management, automated investing, financial planning, thematic investing, retirement planning. Phew. And to think, that's just a small taste of what Schwab offers. Because Schwab knows that when it comes to your finances, choice matters. No matter your goals, investing style, life stage or experience, Schwab has everything you need, all in one place, so you can invest your way. Visit schwab.com to learn more.

1:14From the BBC World Service, this is Diving for Yuko with me, Jake Warren. In Heart and Soul, exploring personal approaches to spirituality from around the world, we're in Japan with Yasuo Takematsu.

1:30It's just after dawn in March this year, a crisp spring morning, a few miles off the coast of Onagawa, a small port in northeast Japan. The sun dances on the water as a small white fishing boat carves through the deep blue of the Pacific. On board is Yasuo Takamatsu. In his late 60s, with salt and pepper hair, Yasuo is donning diving equipment. He moves through his kit without thinking. A kind of absent exactness that comes from doing something hundreds of times. He puts on a weight belt over his dry suit, followed by an equipment harness, face mask and finally air tank. Today he's going down to around 40 metres beneath the surface.

2:20But he's not here for the fish. He's here for his wife.

2:37This is Yasuo's 763rd dive. For 15 long years, he's been searching for his wife's remains. On the 11th of March, 2011, Yasuo's wife Yuko was swept away by the most devastating tsunami ever to hit the Japanese coast. Her body was never recovered. Since then, twice a month, every month, Yasuo has returned to the waters that took her from him. You may have seen this story before. It's often told as a search, as something unresolved. But that's not quite what this is. Seeing Yasuo don his gear on a cold, sunny morning in spring, he's smiley, even friendly. When he talks about his wife, it has that wry humour of a long-lost friend.

3:35If we met, if we are able to meet, I think, surprisingly, she'd probably say to me first, you've gotten old. To understand what keeps Yasuo going back to the waters, we need to step into a world of Japanese culture and a unique relationship with death and nature. For the BBC World Service Heart and Soul, I'm Jake Warren, and this is Diving for Yuko.

4:14In 2011, the largest earthquake in Japan's recorded history triggered a tsunami that hit this coastline. While Yasuo was already on higher ground His wife Yuko was trapped on the roof of her workplace With tsunami warnings blaring on the radio He received a text from her

4:38The message said, are you okay? I want to go home That was the only one that reached my phone There was a question mark after, are you okay? So I thought she must have been worried about me. After that, there was one more message in the history. This one didn't get through. But it just said, the tsunami is terrible.

5:14Believing Yuko had reached safety, Yusuo followed the radio advice and went home. But when Yuko didn't arrive, he went to the hospital. hoping she had been rescued. The fire brigade stopped me, so there was nothing I could do. I came back home. Then the next day, when I went to the hospital to pick her up, I was told that they had been swept away. Since then, I've searched various evacuation centres, but I haven't been able to find her. Yasuo asked the Coast Guard to search for his wife, But the days of looking soon turned into weeks, which then became years. They were looking for bodies in the rubble on land as the waters eventually receded.

6:01Thousands of bodies were recovered, but none of them were Yuko. After two years, he took matters into his own hands.

6:12As time went on, the rubble and debris were being cleared away more and more. I started to think maybe she isn't on land maybe she's in the sea and that's why I started diving

6:41There is a Buddhist idea of the dead among the living a spiritual belief that our loved ones are in our lives long after they pass. This is fundamental in Japanese culture. Of course, grief is universal. Anyone would want to find their loved one's remains. But in Japan, this concept makes a burial without a body especially traumatic. And in that context, being missing means existing in a state where someone has not yet been fully accepted as one of the dead. Fumihiko Sueki, a leading scholar of Japanese Buddhism and philosophies of the dead, explains the problem of a body that is never recovered.

7:33For that reason, the state of being missing is an intermediate, extremely unstable condition, one in which a person has not been confirmed as dead. And precisely because it is so unstable, how to accept that state must have been an extremely difficult problem. From a Western perspective, Yasuo's dives could then be seen as a need for closure, to find her body so he can properly mourn and move on. For that would be wrong. And so that's one perspective of how he's trying to deal with this loss of his wife, who is neither living nor dead, and he's always looking for his wife to be united into his life.

8:22That's Takeshi Morisato, a lecturer in non-Western philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. In the West, death is often seen as an ending, with afterlives imagined as separate realms. Heaven above, hell below. Takeshi explains that in Japan, and for Yosuo, death is understood differently. But I think the Japanese conception of death is also a beginning. It is a process of living as a dead. And also in order for you to really acknowledge your living life.

9:04This idea of the dead among the living flows into Japanese life. The dead are acknowledged in everyday rituals. So it is something very unique to Japanese culture where, you know, wife goes to the tomb of your late husband every month of the day in which he died, which happens in my home as well. Also, every family has like the family altars where the dead is commemorated every morning and you pray to them in the morning and afternoon. In Japan, this repeated visiting of the dead has a name. Visiting of the graves and praying for the dead is called Kuyo in Japanese. The services that are designed to wish for the happiness and rest in peace for the dead so the japanese conception of the dead doesn't mean that the process ends there and then somehow everything is great right the whole process of mourning and the journey kind of takes place on the other side even in buddhism and shintoism so the memorial services tends to be doing for the well-being of the dead but whole practices to deal with your trauma and sense of loss and finding the peace in a way that you can actually be with your wife is also part of Kuyo.

10:23This is exactly how Yasuo understands his dives, as a continued connection with Yuko. I suppose it feels like going to see her. It's a little different from visiting a grave Because she isn't in a grave It feels more like wanting to meet her What started as a search Gradually became a ritual There is that side to it, yes Like offering incense sticks at the Buddhist altar And putting out tea or rice If you called it her habit Then maybe it is her habit Yasuo couldn't bring Yuko's remains to shore so he went to her. Being in the sea, he is surrounded by Yuko. He found a way to connect with her after all.

11:19After diving again and again, I started to feel that she might be nearby. Yes, that's it. I suppose I just think she might be close by. I don't think about it too deeply. Yasuo's dives can be seen as an act of communion, meeting his obligation to honor his wife's spirit. So it isn't a search, not really. And it isn't desperation. It doesn't feel like sadness either. Yasuo says the dives have become something so profound, he'd continue whatever the outcome.

12:04For example, just because I found remains, yes, it's over. Even if, by chance, they were my wife's, would it end there? I don't think it would end there. I'd want to find things for the other people too.

12:31Yasuo resurfaces from his first dive of the morning. his first visit to his wife that day. He hands over his flippers, climbs back onto the boat and heads towards Onagawa Harbour. Though underwater is a time for reflection, on the journey home, Yasuo smiles and talks with his dive partners about what they saw below. Watching him, it doesn't feel like a man who was chasing something lost. To me, it feels like a man who was returning to something.

13:04Jake Warren:Thank you.

13:34Join millions saving billions on hidden fees. Be smart. Get wise. Download the Wise app today. T's and C's apply. You're listening to Diving for Yuko from the BBC World Service with me, Jake Warren. I'm in northeast Japan following Yasuo Takamatsu, seeking to understand why he has spent 15 years diving into the Pacific for his wife, Yuko.

14:05A few hours later, Yasuo heads back out into the Pacific for a second dive. The boat leaves the bay, passing tree-covered islands dotted with Buddhist shrines and distant fishing boats returning with the morning's catch. But Yasuo barely looks up. Quiet and thoughtful, his gaze stays fixed on the waves, his mind on what lies beneath them. Then, pulling on his kit, he jumps into the water.

15:11It feels as though you are flying through the sky, I suppose.

15:19Normally, if you're diving at around 15 meters, there are all kinds of underwater formations, aren't there? Some are like mountains, some are like valleys. And you can float above them and look down at them from above. So it really does feel a bit like flying or floating, I suppose. Because, of course, you actually are floating. It feels like flying.

15:51Floating above the broken underwater landscape, Yasuo understands the terrible power tsunamis have brought to this coastline for generations. cycles of destruction have scattered man-made buildings across the sea floor when i'm looking at the debris i think she couldn't have come back up through all this she must not have been able to make it back up and when i think that i do feel like i might cry

16:31To understand Yasuo's diving, we need to understand Tohoku, the northeastern region of Japan where Onagawa lies and where Yasuo was born and raised. Exposed to the vast expanse of the Pacific, Tohoku has forever lived with the constant threat of earthquakes and tsunamis, a reality that has deeply shaped its culture. Takeshi Morisato explains. This kind of thing happens a lot in the history of Japan. All these incidents where massive people die and how the victims tried to deal with this natural disaster or loss of their family members is quite common knowledge. The Tohoku coastline and the communities that dwell along it still bear the scars of the 2011 tsunami.

17:21The Tohoku region shows that when we had an earthquake and tsunami in the past, We have all these shrines to say the boundary between the world of the ocean and then the people who could live safely. That's why they built the shrines at the edge of the tsunami disaster and its ancestral warning. Yasuo's attention to the world beneath the waves, its mountains, valleys and rubble, reflects a philosophy common to places where natural disasters play a part in everyday life.

17:53Jake Warren:in japanese fudo in english translated as climate food is the wind and though is earth or soil so the wind and the earth is a holistic setting that include all the natural environment and also the history culture everything so this is fudo this is c y cheyong a professor at the university of Tokyo and an expert in philosophies shaped by natural disasters. But in Japan, and especially in Tohoku, this relationship between people and nature is fundamental. So if we have this in mind, what will be the fudo of Japan? Japan's fudo is the monsoon type of fudo, the massive power from nature. But we are not just being completely determined by this climate.

18:51Jake Warren:We are living with it and then we have some kind of response to this monsoon climate. This dialogue between nature and culture has shaped how people from Tohoku see the world. Here, humans are not separate from the environment. They are part of it. That idea is central to Fudo. The understanding that natural disasters will come. What we can control is not nature itself, but how we respond to it. For Yesuo, that raises a profound question. If our deities are meant to protect us, how can they allow nature to hold such devastating power?

19:33God, you know, when something like this happens, like a disaster, you do sometimes look at it with doubt and wonder. Does God really exist? Is there really a God? Why would God do something that causes so many people to die? If God exists, why didn't he save them? But as for the Buddhist altar, I suppose that's a different question.

20:15This quiet acceptance in the face of disaster, even the disaster that took Yusuo's wife, is the very essence of Fudo. Here's Takeshi Morisato again. So if you live in Japan, you accept that there is going to be a typhoon, an earthquake and all these natural disasters. So to live in this Fudo is acceptance. in that process you're going to lose some people so in some ways I think losing someone dear to you and missing that person, looking for that person is also part of the fudo, right? and I think the death of somebody is someone in that natural disaster is really a real reminder that we are part of the natural environment and we will die and we go back to the ground or to the ocean or to the fire whichever tradition you come from

21:08But in modern Japan, technology is changing this relationship. New building methods and industry allows communities to rebuild like never before. And for CY, this allows them to erase the traces of past disasters.

21:25Jake Warren:This is the kind of problem because we have so much attachment to our wind and the soil, our history, or our history of our time was there on the soil. But if we put a piece of massive land to raise the sea level, that means all our previous history, our previous memories of a place are all being buried. Hiding the evidence of natural disasters is a fundamental shift away from Thudo. If we can't remember a past disaster, how can future generations understand it? all our memory of the past is lost. And this is a major loss to us. So we actually want a safer place, of course, but at the same time, we would like to keep our collective memories.

22:12Jake Warren:And if you go to these places by this pilgrimage, I think you understand the importance of this memory. Assur, of course, is trying to do this very personal act of returning to this site of trauma, and to recollect the memories of the past and to look for any kind of remains of his loved ones, for example. But at the same time, it could also be seen as understanding this land to him is not just the nature setting, the natural setting. It is, to him, the food. For Siwai, Yasuo's experience is a reminder that we are not above the whims of nature. the holistic, all the culture, the nature there that was him.

22:59Jake Warren:He was actually part of the food book. He was a food being. That means he cannot just see the sea as something outside his body. This is part of his body.

23:22Yosuo speaks of growing up near the sea, the same sea that would eventually take his wife, and how, even now, he admires it and fears it in equal measure.

23:39It's not particularly because I dive, but ever since I was young, I've been familiar with the sea. Swimming in it, fishing, and various things like that. As for the sea itself, I don't really lose it or anything like that. At the time, there was a tsunami and rough seas, but on the other hand, right, you can catch lots of delicious things. and there's a beautiful scenery. That does exist, right? But I wonder, for me, yeah, not really. Well, there was a tsunami in the disaster, but

24:26I haven't really come to hate it that much.

24:31There are people who can't even stand to look at it anymore. But I haven't gone that far. I don't feel like I'm happy.