Wind
Phone
listening
The Wind
Take care.
Need a real ear? findahelpline.com
listening
The Wind
Take care.
Need a real ear? findahelpline.com
In December 2010 a garden designer named Itaru Sasaki put an old rotary telephone inside a white, glass-paned booth on a hillside in Ōtsuchi, Japan. The line ran nowhere. He had lost his cousin to cancer and needed somewhere to keep talking to him, and he said that because his thoughts could not be relayed over a regular phone line, he wanted them carried on the wind. He called it kaze no denwa, the Wind Phone.
Three months later the 2011 Tōhoku tsunami took more than fifteen thousand people, around fourteen hundred of them from Ōtsuchi alone. Sasaki opened his garden to anyone who needed it, and since then more than thirty thousand people have climbed that hill to pick up a receiver that answers no one.
Not everybody can reach a hillside in Japan. This is a free online Wind Phone, made in memory of my mom, and it works the way the original does: you speak, nobody answers, and that turns out to be the point. Type a name in the field above, or a number, or nothing at all, then press call. Say what you need to say out loud, or in your head, or sit on the open line and say none of it. Hang up when you are finished.
There is no right way to do it and no script, though if picking up feels difficult there is writing here on what a first call is actually like and on what people find themselves saying.
Nothing. This page never asks for your microphone, because there is no microphone in it: your voice is not recorded, not measured, not transcribed and not sent anywhere, and the wind on screen drifts on its own rather than in response to you. The name you type is never transmitted, no account exists, and the phone sets no cookies. The privacy page spells out exactly what that means, line by line.
There are physical Wind Phones in gardens, parks and cemeteries around the world now. We keep a directory of the ones that can be verified, each with coordinates, a source and the date it was last checked. If there is not one near you, building one is genuinely within reach: a disconnected handset, somewhere quiet, and someone willing to look after it.
Grief does not arrive as one thing. It arrives as a Tuesday, a birthday, a voice on an old recording, a question you never got to ask. The reading here is short pieces on particular kinds of missing: a mother, a partner, a baby, a dog who was never only a dog, the first anniversary, the things left unsaid. There is also an honest look at whether any of this helps, and the longer story of the site.
This is not a crisis service and nobody here is a clinician. If today is heavier than usual, Find A Helpline lists free, confidential support lines worldwide, staffed by people who will actually answer. Anything else, including a Wind Phone we have missed: contact.