reporter: this man clears out his mother s house. through the kitchen window he can see the police team search for her body. the mobile was found in the kitchen. she had tried to call tanaka six times after the earthquake, but there was no reception. her last attempt was 3:16, just before the tsunami hit her hometown of kamaishi. what i can do to find her is limited. i appreciate volunteers helping me, but they can t do anything with debris like this. you need professionals. this team is the first to search this area, a search-and-rescue team they are trained to find life, but it s much too late for that. it s been three weeks since the earthquake and the tsunami, and more than 16,000 people are still unaccounted for. crews are working systematically through vast areas of debris to try and find the bodies so at
least the families can pay their last respects. the police chief tells me debris is everywhere. there s not enough manpower so we need heavy equipment to take away the big pieces but the rest we do very carefully. it is painstakingly slow. it has to be that way, we re told, so the digger does not damage a body. a back-breaking day of searching clears a tiny area and finds nothing, but photos or anything that looks precious are put aside for residents to collect. a cross or circle marks the spot that has been searched already, but it s the unfathomable debris as far as the eye can see that could be hiding some of the missing. local residents help alongside emergency services. makota volunteered for the fire brigade and said people come home to collect the belongings and instead they find the body.