In the Japanese prefecture of Iwate you can find a very interesting payphone booth, which is not connected to the city telephone network or anywhere else. Nevertheless, more than ten thousand people have already used it. What are they doing here, you ask?
The answer is simple: they talk with their deceased or missing relatives.
As you know, in March 2011, an incredibly strong earthquake struck off the east coast of Japan, and a devastating tsunami hit the Land of the Rising Sun. The Japanese death toll from that natural disaster is estimated at nearly sixteen thousand. The northern islands of the archipelago were particularly hard hit. Many local regions have not yet fully recovered from the natural disaster.
The village of Otsuchi was very unlucky then. The water covered it in just half an hour, and ten percent of its inhabitants died in the tsunami. That is why today there are so many single-parent families, widows and widowers, orphaned children and parents who have lost their children.
Phone booth heals heart wounds
However, the villagers found a very unusual way to cope with their grief. A year after the tragedy, a local resident Itaru Sasaki set up a white telephone booth with glass windows in his garden on a hill, overlooking the Pacific Ocean. He did this in order to communicate with his cousin, whom he loved very much and who died during the tsunami.
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“I just can't talk to empty space. So I pick up the phone and speak into it as if my brother was somewhere on the other end. I want to believe that my words are picked up by the wind and carried away somewhere where the souls of the dead live,”Sasaki told American journalists in September 2012.
Since then, this payphone has been called the "wind telephone". It soon turned into a kind of pilgrimage site for the Japanese who had lost someone. Itaru didn't mind at all. Every day at least a few compatriots come to his site. Mourners go into the booth, pick up the telephone receiver and talk into it for a long time. A queue of people wishing to “get through to the other world” often lined up near the booth.
An urban legend says that the "wind telephone" really allows you to contact deceased relatives, but not everyone. For example, in August 2014, a girl who came here to talk to her deceased mother actually heard the muffled voice of her relative, who had died a month earlier in a car accident, from the phone. Unfortunately, the Japanese woman was so scared of this that she immediately ran out of the booth, which she still regrets. Such mystical connections with representatives of the other world, no, no, yes, they do happen, so the fame of telephone communication with the afterlife through Sasaki's booth has spread today to almost all of Japan, and beyond its borders, many already know about the "wind telephone" …