Japanese Designer Creates ‘Wind Phone’ to Help People Connect With Their Departed Loved Ones
By Bryan Ke
August 28, 2017
There is a black telephone in Japan that you can use to pour out your feelings and connect with your departed loved ones.
Located in a garden in Otsuchi, the disconnected telephone was set up by 72-year-old garden designer, Itaru Sasaki, after the death of his cousin, according to Straits Times.
The phone in the middle of Sasaki’s garden, called Kaze no Denwa (or the “Phone of the Wind”), has already been visited by over 25,000 people since the Great Eastern Japan Earthquake in March 2011.
“Because my thoughts couldn’t be relayed over a regular phone line. I wanted them to be carried on the wind,” Sasaki said in an interview with Japanese TV channel NHK Sendai.
Sasaki started his work on the phone booth in November 2010 and finished shortly after the tragic earthquake and tsunami event hit Otsuchi.
A notebook can also be found inside the booth in which people can write messages for their loved ones that have passed on.
One of the entries that Sasaki found in the notebook contains a message written in the autumn of 2013, saying, “Come home soon. From your father, mother and grandparents.” The message was written by a family looking for their son who went missing during the horrible disaster in March 2011.
The phone booth seems to have helped other families cope with the loss of their loved ones. As time passes on, Sasaki says people have come to accept the death of their loved ones, writing entries into the book like “Please watch over us from heaven.”
The Phone of the Wind, which is free and open to everyone, can be located outside of Otsuchi just north of Dai Chiwari 11.
Images via Instagram / (Left) Lettuce0329 , (Right) Taktak813
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