Leaden winter skies lour on a coastguard boat as it cuts its way through the seas off Japan's tsunami-wrecked shores.
Somewhere under these unforgiving grey waters lie hundreds, perhaps thousands of bodies; the unfound, unclaimed dead of one of the country's worst ever disasters.
Even though the hunt on these sullen seas goes on every day, Yoshifumi Suzuki says none of his coastguard colleagues has seen a single corpse since the partial remains of a man were untangled from a fishing net in November.
But they are not prepared to give up.
"If we don't do this, nobody will," Suzuki said.
"We want to continue the search until we find the very last one. I want to return people to their families not because it is my official duty, but because it is my duty as a human being."
"The (missing) person is in the mind of his or her family but they still want proof that the person lived in this world. I think it's hard for them to accept the reality" without a body, he said. (AFP)