The wind phone
T he wind phone is an unconnected telephone booth in otshuchi , iwate perfecture , Japan, where visitors can hold one-way conversations with deceased loved ones. Initially created by garden designer Itaru Sasaki in 2010 to help him cope with his cousin's death, it was opened to the public in the following year after the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami killed over 15,000 people in the Tohoku region . The wind phone has since received over 30,000 visitors. When garden designer Sasaki lost his beloved cousin in 2010, he came up with a unique way to deal with his grief: telephone calls to the departed. He decided to build a white British-style telephone booth in his hilltop garden. In it he placed a battered old Bakelite rotary phone, unconnected to any earthly telecom system, to keep in touch with his cousin’s memory by talking with him regularly. “Because my thoughts couldn’t be relayed over a regular phone line,” he told the Japanese public broadcasting network NHK, “I w