Hachiko: A loyal Dog

Dogs are great. I love my dog. He's the smartest idiot I know. Or perhaps the dumbest genius. Since the dawn of domestication, dogs have been our friends, playmates, protectors, caregivers, soldiers and even our food. There's virtually no society on Earth that doesn't have dogs as part of their historic social fabric. We lived together for so long that dogs can actually innately understand human emotion. And that may seem obvious, but as of this video, they're the only other animal that we've ever found who's able to do so, including the apes. We bred dogs to love us. And in turn, they've become an important part of human history.

Like any other social group though, they've had their symbolic heroes and villains, and this is the story of one of their heroes, and in turn a story of all dogs and the story of us. It's a story of Hachiko, the loyal Akita of Shibuya Station. But Hachiko's story isn't exactly rare. There's hundreds if not thousands of stories of dogs loyal beyond comprehension. And yet, it's taken the world by storm. There are dozens of movies, books, statues, plays, poems about this dog. There's even probably the most memorable and moving Futurama episode dedicated to it.

I think that Hachiko is probably the most famous dog who ever lived. But why? Born in 1923, he was the pet of a professor in Tokyo, then one of the fastest growing cities on Earth, already at eight million people and growing all the time. Space was limited and getting more limited every single day. The Akita, Hachiko's breed, is a large and dominant breed of dog. So at the time during his owners life, he would have been considered at the very least a nuisance, and to many, a great source of fear. But every morning, he would follow his owner to Shibuya Station to see him off to work. And every evening, he would come back again to pick him up, all by himself. By all accounts a very good dog. But one day his owner had an aneurysm and died. He didn't come back that evening. Hachiko came, but his owner didn't. Hachiko would never see him again. But that didn't stop him from trying. For over nine years, every day he returned to that station to see if his owner would come back. And even though the modern stories don't show it, he would have been kicked and abused by people at the station. By passengers and station attendants alike.

He was a big dog in a cramped city, and he would have been a major source of fear for some of those commuters. People certainly wouldn't have looked kindly on a dog waiting alone at a major station. Yet he returned. Every day, he returned. In 1932, seven years into his routine, a newspaper caught wind of the story. That one page in the newspaper fundamentally changed not only the life of the dog, but the world in turn, especially the nation of Japan. The story was exactly what 1920's militarized Japanese government was aching for. It was a story of loyalty beyond death. It was the 47 Ronin in dog form.

Overnight attitudes change. Station attendants began to give him attention. Local commuters would give him food. He became a national celebrity. And when he died he was honored in a way that was perhaps even greater than war heroes. He was memorialized in song and poetry. He was given statues across the country. He was even stuffed and put in the major museum here in town in Tokyo. In the 90's, whenever a TV channel found old recordings of his bark, their broadcast drew in millions of listeners. Millions of people to listen to a dog barking. He'd entered the national identity and become more, he'd become a genuine symbol of the Japanese spirit. But that's where it goes deeper.

Hachiko's effect was more than just instilling wartime loyalty. He unwittingly became the dog that saved his breed. Because as Japan was densifying into these conglomerated urban centers, they didn't really have time for a game hunting large dog. His era as a working animal had come and gone, but hadn't really quite crossed over into the domesticated urban pet. So by the time of his owner's death, there was really only about three dozen purebred Akita remaining in the world. But once he was a symbol of the national identity, it isn't like they could just let the breed die off. It'll be terrible propaganda and the imperial government knew it, so they began a breeding program.

They actually during his lifetime made the Akita breed a national historic monument. But during the war, a large breed such as the Akita, with starvation being what it was, it suffered. But because of Hachiko's memory, it survived. It didn't just survive, but after the war, it thrived. Oddly enough, Helen Keller was the first to bring it to the United States, followed by a lot of US servicemen who'd heard the story of Hachiko and liked the dogs in general. Now it's one of the world's more popular dog breeds. Hachiko saved his breed. As the story of Hachiko is retold and reshaped by the new cultures it encounters, it has to sort of mold to fit that new environment. It's no longer this symbol of loyalty in the face of unstoppable militarist policy, or undying love for an emperor. Our needs changed, and the story followed suit.

In Hachiko's story, we see the fulfillment of our constantly changing desires, particularly with the spreading pet culture popularized by the West, it now represents the more generic desire to be loved by our animals. To believe that we're important to the beings that are important to us. There's no question that without Hachiko the Akita breed would be extinct today. But the point of the story is to show that it isn't because he waited for his master. It's because he became part of the frame that we place upon the world. He became a symbol of something that humans wanted for themselves. A symbol to believe in. A good dog.