The Beloved Dog in Japan

            Not many animal rights activists are aware of the deep-abiding love for dogs in countries outside the Western world. Especially in Asia, the Chinese in particular get a bad rap. We hear stories about the consumption of animals that are domesticated and beloved as pets. There is certainly truth to this.

             But despite that, there is also a sensitivity for animals that has not been cultivated through the religious traditions in the West that have in the East, primarily in their greatest religious export to the Western world: Buddhism.

Some of the earliest efforts towards animal rights came from Tsunayoshi of the Tokugawa Shogunate, known affectionately as the dog shogun.  Tsunayoshi was the great-grandson of Tokugawa Ieyasu and lived in seventeenth-century feudal Japan. He was born in the year of the dog and was known to Engelbert Kaempfer, a German physician who wrote early Western observations on feudal Japan.  Tsunayoshi’s sensitivity towards animals came by way of Confucianism. Inherent to this Chinese-born tradition is the idea that humans cannot bear the suffering of other sentient beings and so they must be humane towards their non-human neighbors.  The shogun wrote edicts later titled Edicts on Compassion for Living Things, which were read daily, in which he encouraged the population to be kind to animals. Tsunayoshi’s is remembered for the rescue and kenneling of thousands of stray and unwanted dogs, especially those mistreated, abused, and left to die in the capital Edo. A fund was established from the general population tax, which provided fish and rice for the dogs that were kenneled and it became an enforceable crime to abuse dogs, an action that upset many and lead to the pejorative name “Inu Kubo” or dog shogun.

A second story comes from modernity, showing at least one dog to be most noble of all creatures. In a culture enamored with the Shinto ideal of ancestral remembrance, Hachikō’s unwavering loyalty became a symbol for national identity, unity, and faithfulness to the country. The story goes that the dog was taken in by a local professor who travelled back and forth from his home to Shibuya Station in the heart of Tokyo. The dog grew to the pattern of this routine, and so when one day the professor, who had a cerebral brain hemorrhage, did not return, the dog continued to wait for him - and waited, and waited for a total of nine years. The story played to the popular imagination when it was tabloidized on October 4, 1932 by the Asahi Shimbun, a large circulation newspaper serving Tokyo. Each year on March 8 in Tokyo on the spot where a statue honoring Hachikō was erected, dog lovers gather to pay tribute and remember the dog whose loyalty was said to be matchless.  There is no single dog that has been given as much attention as Hachikō. And the ideals of honor and loyalty and respect combined with the ideas in Confucianism and Buddhism of the innate worth of all living things plays well into the Japanese cultural conscience that teeters on an undefined line between the secular and sacred.