Arthur Brooks

In other words, how we can make what seems like a terrible curse, maybe even into a blessing.

So that's today's show.

I was struck some years ago, in 2010 to be specific, of something I read about the terrible Fukushima earthquake and tsunami that overwhelmed the nuclear plant on the coast of Japan and wound up killing 20,000 people.

You remember this?

It was just, maybe you don't remember it, but

It was horrible.

It was like one of the worst in a developed country, an unimaginable disaster.

There was an artist in Japan named Itaru Sasaki who had members of his family that perished in this terrible tragedy.

And he was trying to figure out some way to make that loss more meaningful.

He made an art installation that wound up having a profound impact on the entire region.

He created...

Something he called the or the wind phone.

What it was, was in his town, which had lost 10% of his population, by the way.

I mean, no joke.

Everybody lost somebody in his town.

He set up a phone booth with a phone that recorded people's calls, but wasn't hooked up to anybody else.

And in the wind phone, he asked people to come and to call their dead relatives and leave them a message.

30,000 people have done it to date.

30,000 people have gone.

It'll be old men who are totally stoic and will be weeping into the phone as they're talking to their wives or their children or something.