On Japan’s Post Office For Letters to the Dead

In this excerpt from Sally Hayden’s book, This Is Also a Love Story: A Reporter’s Search for Goodness in a Cruel World, Yuji Akagawa, “a grandfather in his seventies,” recalls the aftermath of the 9.1 magnitude earthquake that struck Japan on March 11, 2011. The seismic event was so powerful that it shook the earth for six minutes. The subsequent tsunami hit less than an hour later, destroying everything in its path, erasing roads and landmarks, making the land unrecognizable to those who survived. Over 22,000 people were declared missing or dead in the wake of the twin disasters. Akagawa created what he calls “the drifting post,” so named because “the letters drift between heaven and earth.” It’s a public post office and community space where survivors share their letters to lost loved ones, letters that Akagawa collects in binders that can read by members of the public, to help them in their grief.

At the very end of the garden was another room, like a cabin, built by Akagawa himself. It housed sixteen binders of letters, six chairs and a desk, where people could relax or take a moment if they were “trying not to cry.” Sometimes multiple visitors turned up at once. Occasionally, they made friends with each other. Unless writers specified that they wanted their letter to remain private, Akagawa would place them in his binders so they could be read by other mourners; it might help them assemble their own thoughts. The writers were willing for their letters to be made public, he said: this made the mourning more collective. “Finding out that you are not alone is the most important thing, finding out that you are not the only person who is grieving.” As I leafed through the binders, the wind outside was so strong that it sounded like heavy rain.