![]() ![]() It's a way to stay in touch, to let them know that they're still a big part of our family. And every day, he leaves fresh fruit and rice for them, lights incense, and rings a bell. Lots of families keep a Buddhist altar for their dead relatives in the living room. The line between our world and their world is thin. ![]() The idea of keeping up a relationship with the dead is not such a strange one in Japan. So I named it the wind telephone- kaze no denwa. And so putting an old phone booth in his garden, which sits on this little windy hill overlooking the Pacific Ocean, it felt like a perfect solution. He just needed a place where he felt like he could talk to his cousin, a place where he could air out his grief. It didn't work at all.īut that didn't matter to Itaru. Inside is a black rotary phone, resting on a wood shelf. It's square and painted white, and has these glass window panes. He went out and bought an old-fashioned phone booth and stuck it in his garden. And Itaru was having a hard time figuring out how to talk about it. But a year before that tsunami happened, this guy named Itaru Sasaki- he was already dealing with a loss. Today, it's still partly in ruins and partly a construction site, as they try to rebuild the town on higher ground. Of all the areas in Japan affected by that tsunami, Otsuchi has one of the highest numbers of missing people- 421. And she watched this documentary about this thing people are doing Otsuchi, on the Japanese news channel, NHK, and got permission for us to play you some excerpts. One of our producers, Miki Meek, has family in Japan.Īnd she grew up going back and forth between there and here. But it's something close to that- this thing that people invented to stay connected to the dead. And in the aftermath, of course, families struggled to figure out how they were going to move forward without the people they loved.Īnd in that town of Otsuchi, it lead to this new- I don't know, ritual is not exactly the right word for this. The tsunami and the earthquake that went with it killed six times more people than died in 9/11- over 19,000 people. In 30 minutes, it was gone- almost totally flattened. So remember that tsunami that hit Japan five years ago, March 2011? Giant black waves more than 30-feet tall hit Japan.Ī guy in a little town called Otsuchi shot this video. And let's just get to it with the first act of our show. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. Also, I want to give every possible second to these stories. And to say anything else about these stories, I think, would be a spoiler. They see death standing there, and they open their mouths. Well, today on our program, we have two stories where ordinary people rise to this exact task. Strangelove." And of course, right? What can words do when you're staring death in the face? Gilinsky writes, "The conversations were about scraped kids' knees and sick dogs. But in that call, they were not allowed to say why they were calling. ![]() He said the General in charge told the staff he expected an order to launch nuclear missiles any moment, and also expected that they would all die from a Soviet counterattack.Īnd everybody was allowed to make one phone call home to their family. He said, basically, nuclear war seemed so imminent that the underground headquarters of the Strategic Air Command in Nebraska went into lock down. Victor Gilinsky wrote about this for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. But we have confirmed this with people who were there. There's this moment during the Cuban Missile Crisis that's so incredible, it doesn't sound real. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |