Speaking your grief to the wind

Loss hits us in unexpected situations.

Maybe something funny happens and the first thing you think is to call your mother. She would love this. You pick up the phone. You still remember the number. Yet, there is no one to call. She’s been gone all these years.

Perhaps it was that impulse that led garden designer Itaru Sasaki of Otsuchi, Japan, to install a phone booth and phone in his hilltop garden. The old rotary phone inside is disconnected, but you can go into the glass phone booth, pick up the phone, dial the number you know so well.

Sasaki calls it Kaze-no-Denwa, the phone of the wind. He set it up in 2010 when he lost his cousin and needed help dealing with the grief. It was intended just as a private way to carry his thoughts to his cousin on the wind, he told Bloomberg News.

But just a year later, the 11,000 residents of Otsuchi were hit by an earthquake, then a tsunami. In Otsuchi, 1,200 people died. The entire fishing industry was wiped out. In the region, the disaster took the lives of 15,000 people.

So, just a year after he set up the phone for his private grief, Sasaki opened his garden to the public. Today 30,000 people have sent messages on the wind to their loved ones.

The wind phone is an idea that inspired movies, books, and copies. Similar phones have been installed worldwide. One of the most recent installations was in Aspen Mountain in Colorado, where an anonymous artist installed a phone on a tree in March 2021. Its location is unadvertised, mainly because art installations are prohibited in national forests.