$~~~~$On a hilltop overlooking the 2011-tsunami hit Otsuchi Town in northeastern Japan, there is a white phone booth standing all alone in the wind. The lonely “wind phone” serves to connect family members to their loved ones who died in the tsunami that claimed 18,000 lives. People come to speak to those they have lost, to say the words they never got to say on that day.
$~~~~$The idea for the wind phone was first by a Japanese garden designer named Itaru Sasaki, who was grieving over the death of his cousin in 2010, before the tsunami. Feeling that he needed a private space to help him navigate through the , Sasaki positioned a booth where he could “speak” to the dead relative. The booth he built only an old dial phone with a disconnected phone line. When he stepped into the booth, he could pick up the phone to call his cousin, telling him how he was, and how he missed him. Sasaki stated in an interview: “Because my thoughts couldn’t be through a regular phone line, I wanted them to be carried on the wind.” Hence, the wind phone allows Sasaki to create a one-way conversation with deep, soulful personal meaning, and renders the grieving process more for him.
$~~~~$Sasaki opened his wind phone to the public in 2011, after the devastating tsunami. News about the phone gradually spread, and the booth has become a between the living and the dead. Phones resembling the wind phone have since been built around the world. Some were even set up to allow people to call their loved ones lost in the COVID-19 pandemic.
$~~~~$Grieving is a natural for coping with loss of a loved one, and people grieve in various ways. For those who speak into the wind phone, is always there: They believe that their messages will—through some unknown way—reach the deceased.