by John M. Glionna, Los Angeles Times , July 15, 2011.

Ishinomaki, Japan- For months now, the drill has been the same: Maromu Oikawa grabs a shovel and chainsaw and gathers up the three precious photographs.

Then he ventures out alone, on foot, on a mission that has become a painful personal obsession. He is a husband and father desperately trying to reclaim what he has lost.

The 30-year-old firefighter combs the riverbanks, rubble-strewn rice fields and weed-choked gullies where he thinks he might find them. He uses the shovel to pry up chunks of concrete, the saw to slice through jagged shards of wood, looking for that chance macabre encounter: the jutting form of a hand, a face.

Oikawa is searching for the bodies of his wife and baby daughter, who disappeared March 11 when the earthquake-triggered tsunami washed across this rural landscape, pulling houses from their foundations and dragging residents to their deaths. READ...