On March 11, 2011 an earthquake with a magnitude of 9.1 off the coast of Sendai, Japan, a catastrophic tsunami crashed onto the island. Waves 40 meters high roared through the region, killing 15,500 people and destroying the homes of more than 450,000. When the tsunami reached the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, it caused the meltdown of three nuclear reactors and spewed radioactive material into the environment, creating a disaster on top of a disaster.
Garden designer Itaru Sasaki lost his cousin to cancer just months before tragedy devastated his town, the small fishing village of Otsuchi. In an attempt to process his grief, he decided to create a mourning space in his backyard, a space that would provide peace and a symbolic connection with his loved one.
Set in a lush garden, there is a small glass-paneled booth with a chair and a built-in desk with a notebook, a pen and a black rotary phone. The vintage device is not connected to a service line, a separation that gives the space its name: Kaze no denwaor the ‘Phone of the Wind’, a nod to the idea that anything spoken into the receivers will only be transmitted through the air.
Given its location in a place indelibly affected by mass casualties, Sasaki’s stand quickly became a useful intervention for grieving families: Otsuchi lost about 10 percent of its population in the disaster, a third of whose bodies have never been identified or found. The designer eventually opened the space to visitors, and within a short time tens of thousands of people began making the pilgrimage to his garden.
Sasaki told Tessa Fontaine that she was writing for The believer in 2018:
Life lasts at most 100 years. But death is something that lasts much longer, both for the person who died and for the survivors, who must find a way to feel connected to the dead. Death does not end life. All the people left after that are still trying to figure out what to do about it. They need a way to feel connected.
In other words, the “Telephone of the Wind” is a physical recognition that grief continues, that life never really returns to “normal” after loss.
In early 2020, Amy Dawson’s daughter Emily died after a long illness. While dealing with her own loss and studying to become a grief coach, Dawson discovered Sasaki’s “Phone of the Wind.” She felt an affinity with the idea and through additional research quickly found similar projects in the US
“I very much believe that the people who came before us are still around us and that their energy does not disappear,” Dawson tells us one morning via Zoom, echoing Sasaki. This sentiment, atypical of American and other Western audiences, is found in many cultures. Consider Mexico’s Día de Muertos, a fall holiday described as a family reunion between the living and the dead. The Buddhist Obon Festival in Japan is similar and evokes visits from ancestors.
For many Americans, however, the grieving process is granted a handful of days off, followed by a painful and often isolating period of grief relegated to the shadows. Death is often taboo.
Dawson continually strives to remedy this social stigma and as part of her work began cataloging the phone booths and their locations, which she eventually collected into a huge directory called My wind phone. The searchable map features photos and stories from its creators and tracks more than 300 ‘Wind Phones’ around the world, each individually installed and maintained.
That Dawson lives in the US undoubtedly contributes to My Wind Phone’s popularity in the United States, although the abundance of designs also points to a profound reality: people are hungry for space to process their heartbreak and for greater recognition that don’t mourn ‘t end with a funeral or when cleanup from a natural disaster is completed.
“I get a lot of communication from people who feel or feel like they can take the next step forward because they feel like they can make a phone call and say what they need to say,” Dawson says. “Some call once. Some people go back every week.”
Encounters with “Wind Phones” in the wild are sometimes intentional and others a welcome surprise. “I came across the ‘Wind Phone’ and felt a little crazy calling my mom until I couldn’t anymore, and I had to tell her I love her,” a woman named Marlene told Dawson. “I have not felt as connected to her as I do today since her death in 2016.”
Another comment from Paul D. is similar: “I think the ‘Wind Phones’ appearing in the world are teaching us all that it’s okay to grieve and that pain and loss are real. I never got over or moved on from the loss of my mother, and I know now that that’s okay. I will keep calling her until the day I die.”
In the decade since Sasaki created the ‘Phone of the Wind’, the project has grown into a movement with broad cultural implications. In 2019, writer and director Kristen Gerweck was released a critically acclaimed short film fictionalizing a story about seven strangers connected by a telephone on the cliff. Saski himself wrote a now out-of-print book about the experience, which also inspired at least two novels by North American writers.
Beyond networks like Dawson’s, the movement is largely decentralized: anyone with the space and desire can create a “Wind Phone.” This means that designs, locations and accessibility vary widely, and no one knows exactly who created the second or third phone or how the designs proliferated so quickly.
Several – from one in Evanston, Illinois, to another in Langley, British Columbia, and another in Amsterdam – use the iconic British booth, painted in bright red. Others are simple wooden boxes attached to trees and benches, or a single telephone nestled into a rock, as in the island village of Rhoscolyn, Wales. “Wind phones” take different shapes and forms for different people, similar to the grief they help ease.
As the project grows and we collectively destigmatize loss, Dawson hopes people remember that loss is broad and that death is not the only reason someone experiences grief. “You lose a job, a relationship, your house is foreclosed on, whatever you can think of, all the million ways people grieve,” she adds. “People turn to ‘Wind Phones’ for more than just death, and that’s really important.”
Visit My wind phone to find one near you.
