A 66-year-old Japanese woman, Kikue Hirano, nervously enters a phone booth. Sighs! She is wearing a puffy winter jacket with a fur-lined hood. Unlike other phone booths which are besides a road or a pavement, this one is a little eccentric as it is placed in middle of a garden on a hill and is surrounded by beautiful flowers on all sides, giving an impression that it does not belong there. Pristine white in colour. The booth has a modest rotary telephone with a diary and pen. Kikue hesitates a bit, then picks up the phone, dials whispering the numbers aloud.
Four…two…five…seven….
She is calling her husband.
She presses the phone tight against her ears as slowly her eyes start getting a little teary. She looks up, staring at the ceiling of the booth, clenching her teeth, trying hard not to cry. She had a plethora of things to share with her husband, but in this moment, she couldn’t utter a single word. She hangs up, lingers in the booth for a little longer and then walks out.
This is a tale shared by many people. Thousands of people have visited this particular phone booth over the years since its inception. What is different or rather special about this phone is that it isn’t really connected to anything.
So why do people travel around the world to talk over a disconnected phone?
This booth was built in 2010, by Itaru Sasaki who lived in a small town called Otsuchi in Japan. The phone was built after his cousin, who he was very close to, passed away. This phone helped him mourn his personal loss by metaphorically being connected to his cousin long after he was gone. As he believed and I quote ‘Because my thoughts couldn’t be relayed over a regular phone wire, I want them to be carried on the wind’.
It was named ‘kaze no denwa’ in Japanese, which translates into ‘The Wind Phone‘.
In the following year, 2011, a catastrophic tsunami hit the northeastern Japan killing almost nineteen thousand people. Innumerable went missing. By word of mouth, soon, the existence and purpose of this phone was relayed to others and it was opened to public as many people visited The Wind Phone to talk to their loved ones who passed away in this disaster.
Over the years, The Wind Phone gained popularity not just in Japan, but worldwide. People all around the world visit this booth to talk to the person they have lost. Some of the visitors, who are also referred as pilgrims, plan annual trips to this booth and visit every year to update their loved ones about what is happening in their lives. When you hear some of the recordings (a documentary was made by Japanese television channel covering a few conversations), the voice and belief of the person talking over the call is so earnest. So genuine. Some even claim that they hear back the voice of their loved ones on the phone.
When someone close to us passes away, we know there is absolutely nothing that we can do to get that person back. This is how life is designed. But a sheer fact or a possibility that the one who has left can at least listen to what we have to say can help us so much in dealing with the grief. We all want to hold on to that little hope that keeps us connected to the people we love.
What really baffles me about this entire story is that although everyone have their own mechanisms of dealing with grief, yet, how grief as an emotion is experienced in the exact same way by all the human beings. Irrespective of anything.
And how we always hope for solace to find us in some way, in any way.
Footnote: If you want to listen to snippets of the phone conversations, This American Life Podcast has covered it in the episode “One last thing before I go”.
-Sanketa Raut
Samay and Solace 