A telephone booth known as the “Ocean Phone,” where bereaved families can go and speak to loved ones who died in the 2022 sinking of the tourist boat Kazu I off the Shiretoko Peninsula in Hokkaido, has been installed along the coast of Rausu, a town on the peninsula’s eastern side.

On Sunday, a 54-year-old man from Obihiro, Hokkaido, who helped install the booth, picked up the receiver and thought of his eldest son, who was 7 at the time of the incident, and his former wife, then 42, both of whom remain missing following the disaster in April 2022.

The idea was proposed by Kenji Sakurai, a 63-year-old local fisherman who took part in volunteer searches for those missing after the accident, which left 20 passengers and crew members dead and six others unaccounted for.

After consulting with the man and others, Sakurai decided to set up the booth, with construction beginning in April.

The roughly 2-meter-tall wooden booth contains an old-fashioned black telephone that is not connected to a phone line, as…