How to behave at a Wind Phone
Short version: wait, watch nothing, take nothing, leave nothing that rots.
A physical Wind Phone sits outside. Usually in a garden, a churchyard, a hospice ground, sometimes at the end of a trail. It has no staff and no sign-in sheet. The rules that keep it usable are not posted anywhere. They are just observed, mostly by people who worked them out the hard way.
Here they are, plainly. If you are looking for one to visit, the verified ones are listed here.
Wait at a distance
If someone is already at the phone, stop well back. Twenty feet is not too far. You will know they are finished when they hang up and step away, not before. Do not hover at the edge of the booth. Do not clear your throat. A person holding a receiver to a parent or a child they buried does not need an audience, and does not need to feel a queue forming behind them.
If the wait is long, that is not a sign to leave. It is a sign that someone needed the time.
No photographs of the person using it
Photograph the booth from outside if you want to, with no one in frame. Do not photograph a stranger mid-call. You do not know what they are saying and you have no claim on the moment. This holds even if the shot would be striking. Especially then.
The notebook
Many Wind Phones keep a notebook nearby, the way Sasaki's original booth does in Ōtsuchi. People write in it after the call: a name, a date, sometimes a line or two. Read it if it is left out for reading. Do not photograph pages, do not quote them anywhere, and do not treat it as material. It was written for the dead, not for you.
If you write in it yourself, write plainly. You do not owe an explanation to whoever reads it next.
Take nothing, leave nothing that will rot
Some visitors leave flowers or small objects at the booth. If you do, choose something that will not decay into litter: a stone, not a sandwich, a dried flower rather than a fresh one that will brown and smell within a week. Whoever maintains the site, often one person doing it unpaid, will otherwise be the one clearing your gift out of the grass a month from now.
Do not take anything from the booth as a souvenir. Not a page from the notebook, not an object someone left, not the receiver itself. It is easy to tell yourself a small thing will not be missed. It will be missed by the next person who needed it there.
If you are only curious
Curiosity is not a reason to stay away, but it changes what you owe the place. Look, read the sign if there is one, keep your distance from anyone using the phone, and leave before you become part of someone else's grief. An online Wind Phone exists partly for people who want the idea without the pilgrimage, and it asks nothing of you that a shared physical booth does. If you are thinking about putting one somewhere near you, these are the manners you will eventually be asking other people to keep.
Say what you need to say. The line is connected to nothing: no one hears you, nothing is recorded, nothing is stored.