Inside is a busy visitors book and an old phone handset. Photo / Mikinee, CC
Inside is a busy visitors book and an old phone handset. Photo / Mikinee, CC
In a garden on the edge of Otsuchi Northern Japan is a white phone booth. In spite of having no wired connection, and sitting in an area of perfect cellphone reception, the booth attracts 10,000 visitors a year.
This is the "Phone of the Wind" (風の電話). It has beenon the hill since 2010, when Itaru Sasaki installed the white windowed box in his garden shortly after losing his cousin to cancer. It was a tribute to him but also the things Sasaki regretted not having said.
It was an eccentric gesture, but one that would find connection with other residents in Otsuchi when a shared tragedy struck. Just months later the port town would be hit by the 2011 Tōhoku Tsunami.
The low lying coastal region was decimated by the 9.0 magnitude earthquake and following Tunami. 800 were dead and over 600 people missing, never to be found. Even ten years on there are many mourners who have not found out what happened to their loved ones.
"There are many people who were not able to say goodbye" Sasaki told Reuters news. "There are families who wish they could have said something at the end."
The view of Otsuchi following the 2011 Tōhoku Tsunami. Photo / US Navy, Supplied
A decade after the Tsunami the scars of the earthquake are still visible along Japan's East Coast. There are similar stories all along the shoreline. 200km to the south in Fukushima, people are still unable to return to an exclusion zone around the damaged Fukushima Daiichi power plant. However, Otsuchi has become a pilgrimage site for those still grieving.
Inside the garden ornament, in the secluded corner of the garden you will find a shelf, a visitors book and a black, Bakelite rotary phone.
Visitors come from all over Japan, to place one-way calls to lost family and friends. The Phone of the Wind has become a national sensation. It has inspired multiple films including last year's Voices in the Wind, a piece of Japanese musical theatre and a 2019 film by Werner Herzog, who was amazed to see people using the phone during a visit.
Voices in the Wind, 2020: the phone has inspired many visitors and filmmakers. Photo / Berlinale, Supplied
The notebook contains messages not only those lost in the 2011 disaster. Children have placing calls to grandparents, increasingly those who have lost loved ones to unexpected illness.
Sasaki says he has been approached by artists in Poland and the United Kingdom with ideas to create similar projects for those who have lost people to Covid 19.
"The pandemic came suddenly and when a death is sudden, the grief a family experiences is also much larger," Sasaki told Reuters.
