Empire of Dogs

Canines, Japan, and the Making of the Modern Imperial World

Aaron Skabelund

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9780801463242
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Japanese History
• Index: History

In 1924, Professor Ueno Eizaburo of Tokyo Imperial University adopted an Akita puppy he named Hachiko. Each evening Hachiko greeted Ueno on his return to Shibuya Station. In May 1925 Ueno died while giving a lecture. Every day for over nine years the Akita waited at Shibuya Station, eventually becoming nationally and even internationally famous for his purported loyalty. A year before his death in 1935, the city of Tokyo erected a statue of Hachiko outside the station. The story of Hachiko reveals much about the place of dogs in Japan's cultural imagination.

In the groundbreaking Empire of Dogs, Aaron Herald Skabelund examines the history and cultural significance of dogs in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Japan, beginning with the arrival of Western dog breeds and new modes of dog keeping, which spread throughout the world with Western imperialism. He highlights how dogs joined with humans to create the modern imperial world and how, in turn, imperialism shaped dogs' bodies and their relationship with humans through its impact on dog-breeding and dog-keeping practices that pervade much of the world today.

In a book that is both enlightening and entertaining, Skabelund focuses on actual and metaphorical dogs in a variety of contexts: the rhetorical pairing of the Western "colonial dog" with native canines; subsequent campaigns against indigenous canines in the imperial realm; the creation, maintenance, and in some cases restoration of Japanese dog breeds, including the Shiba Inu; the mobilization of military dogs, both real and fictional; and the emergence of Japan as a "pet superpower" in the second half of the twentieth century. Through this provocative account, Skabelund demonstrates how animals generally and canines specifically have contributed to the creation of our shared history, and how certain dogs have subtly influenced how that history is told. Generously illustrated with both color and black-and-white images, Empire of Dogs shows that human-canine relations often expose how people—especially those with power and wealth—use animals to define, regulate, and enforce political and social boundaries between themselves and other humans, especially in imperial contexts.

1

THE NATIVE DOG AND THE COLONIAL DOG

The dog of the East has degenerated below the standard of the true savage; for, in his questionable position, like the half-civilized Indian, he retains none of the virtues of his original state, and acquires all the vices of artificial society. “In the East,” says a distinguished traveler, “the dog loses all his good qualities; he is no longer the faithful animal, attached to his master, and ready to defend him even at the expense of his life; on the contrary, he is cruel and blood-thirsty—a gloomy egotist, cut off from all human intercourse, but not the less a slave.”

—Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 1855

Over two decades after an unnamed Harper’s writer asserted that, like American Indians, Asian canines were vicious, cutthroat, and decadent, the prolific British travel writer Isabella Bird (1831–1904) expressed a similar loathing for the dogs she encountered while journeying in northern Japan in 1878. The “primitive Japanese dog—a cream-coloured wolfish-looking animal, the size of a collie, very noisy and aggressive, but as cowardly as bullies are—,” she complained, “was in great force in Fujihara, and the barking, growling, and quarrelling of these useless curs continued at intervals until daylight; and when they were not quarrelling, they were howling.”1 This may sound like a matter-of-fact account—especially to anyone whose sleep has been disrupted much of the night by barking dogs—but the repetition of words such as “barking, growling, quarreling, howling” and particularly the use of terms like “primitive, wolfish, aggressive, cowardly, curs” were typical of the language of canine imperialism—the rhetoric of civilization and scientific racism—widely deployed by Westerners to describe indigenous dogs during the age of New Imperialism.

Like the Harper’s writer and Bird, Western visitors to colonized and colonizable regions such as the Japanese archipelago repeatedly denigrated such canines in the harshest terms. Tellingly, regardless of where they were, Westerners often referred collectively to these animals as “native dogs” or “pariah dogs,” consciously grouping them with canines who roamed cities and towns elsewhere in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Self-described British adventurer George Fleming’s description of a group of indigenous dogs who barked at him “savagely” on the outskirts of a Chinese city was typical:

It is somewhat curious to find this breed of the Canis familiaris so widely diffused over the world . . . abounding in every corner of China that one chances to put foot in. Closely allied to the Pariah dog of India, the savage pest of Cairo and Egypt generally, those of Syria, and those snarling droves which we have been so often obliged to pelt off with stones by moonlight, in the narrow streets of Stamboul [Istanbul]—the Pariah dog of North China is, like them, allowed to breed and to infest the towns and villages free from disturbance, to congregate on the plains or in the fields during the day, or to kennel in the graveyards; while at night they prowl about the streets like our scavengers at home, sweeping off the quantities of filth and trash that strew the thoroughfares.2

These dogs, who made up the vast majority of canines in mid-nineteenth-century Japan and many other areas, were semiferal animals who formed small groups and claimed particular urban neighborhoods and villages as their territory. Such dogs, who survive by scavenging human waste, still inhabit the peripheries in many places where humans dwell, especially in parts of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The biologists Raymond and Lorna Coppinger call such canines “village dogs.”3 I prefer to call them street dogs, because they live(d) in and on the outskirts of both urban centers and rural areas. Unlike the canines who accompanied Westerners to Japan and elsewhere in the colonial world, local street dogs did not belong to anyone in particular, although some people in a neighborhood might take a liking to a certain dog and treat it kindly. Westerners were much less likely to do so. Almost without exception, they despised native street dogs, and their letters, travelogues, and memoirs are sprinkled with derogatory references to them and explicit comparisons linking these “uncivilized curs” with the peoples who inhabited the imperial realm.

When Europeans and Americans embarked on projects of empire building and colonial rule in the decades before and after Bird’s visit to Japan, they were often accompanied by large, purebred, and powerful dogs. Just as colonized and colonizable areas and their inhabitants came to be associated with indigenous street dogs, Westerners came to be identified with their canines, whom I call “colonial dogs.” Even among those Westerners who did not bring along a dog, an imagined, mutual affinity apparently drew human and beast together. This was the case for William Elliot Griffis (1843–1912) and an “American dog,” at least according to the former. We shall, unfortunately, never know what the dog thought. In early 1871, Griffis, a recent graduate of Rutgers College in New Brunswick, New Jersey, arrived in the rural Japanese city of Fukui to teach at an academy sponsored by the former feudal domain of Echizen. He was soon joined—as he recalled in The Mikado’s Empire (1876), one of the first serious Western books about Japan’s history and society—by the “black dog, with but one eye.” Griffis speculated that the animal, whose name he does not record, had mistakenly wandered away from the safety of the foreign settlement in Yokohama and followed a domain party on its journey to Echizen. On meeting this human compatriot, the dog, Griffis surmised, “apparently fully understood, as I could tell from the language of his tail, that I was one of his own country creatures, concentrating all his affection in his remaining orb.”4 The dog and Griffis were evidently not the only ones to make a connection between Westerners and foreign dogs. According to Griffis, before their initial meeting, the animal happened to “pass some farmers, who, reversing the proverb ‘Love me, love my dog,’ and hating foreigners, whom they believed to be descendants of these brutes . . . struck the poor creature in the eye with a grass-hook, and made him a Cyclops from that moment.”5 Although the sad fate of the “American dog” was not typical for a “colonial dog,” Griffis’ description of his canine companion was emblematic of the language Westerners employed to talk about their own dogs. As highlighted by Griffis’ depiction of the dog signaling its affection via its tail and lone eye, Europeans and Americans depicted their dogs as warmhearted, reliable, and respected partners.

The rhetorical pairing of the colonial dog with the native dog is central to my analysis. Both colonizers and the colonized viewed the two sets of dogs as distinct and subjected them to explicit and implicit comparison. Individuals on both sides of the imperial divide portrayed the colonial dog as possessing attributes worthy of imperial power. Usually, they claimed that it was civilized, thoroughly domesticated but powerful, and they esteemed it as purebred. On the other hand, colonizers and many of the colonized described the native dog as primitive, aggressive but cowardly, and wolfish or of mixed, wild, or no breed. Such expressions were not merely idle talk. Often, though not always, when people talked about colonial and native dogs, they were revealing their attitudes about colonial and native peoples.

To be sure, such terms as the “colonial dog” and “native dog,” like the phrase “canine imperialism,” are anachronistic. Although both colonizers and the colonized viewed specific dogs and dog-keeping practices as representative of imperial power, rarely did they see them as worthy of note or analysis. The colonial dog was not a marked category but was taken for granted as the standard of the ideal canine, especially by colonizers. To the Harper’s “distinguished traveler,” the colonial dog was the implicit benchmark, the dog endowed with the “good qualities” of faithfulness, bravery, and attachment to his master, which the dog of the East had supposedly lost. Westerners, like the Harper’s author, Bird, and Fleming talked far more often and explicitly about the characteristics of the native dog and the local human communities that interacted with it. The term “native dog,” too, is problematic, with its baggage of colonial arrogance and anthropological conceit, but it is less anachronistic than other terms, such as “indigenous” or “local” dog. It coexisted and was synonymous with other derogatory labels for the dogs of the periphery, such as “pariah” and “kaffir,” which were used also to designate—and denigrate—human populations, and whose connections with the colonial apparatus are obvious indeed. “Pariah,” originally used to label members of a very extensive low caste in southern India, quickly became a term of aspersion for any person or animal of a degraded or despised class. Apart from its original usage, it was most often deployed toward dogs, as illustrated by the British adventurer Fleming’s observations, not only on the Indian Subcontinent but throughout the colonial world, including Japan, China, the Middle East, as well as in other “backward” areas such as eastern Europe. Similarly, Europeans employed “kaffir,” a derogatory term for black Africans, to mark other animal and plant objects, especially dogs, throughout that continent. In short, the “Otherness” and explicit inferiority of the native, whether human or canine, was a central theme of colonial discourses, whereas the cultural peculiarities of the colonizers went for the most part unremarked.

Perhaps because of the pervasive and commonplace presence of dogs, humans have often deployed them metaphorically, and frequently their statements about and actual interaction with canines reveal preoccupations and prejudices entirely unrelated to the canine world. This pattern is evident, among other places, in the Harper’s passage, the description of street dogs by Bird and Fleming, and the treatment of the “American dog” by Griffis and (allegedly) by the local farmers, all of whom projected their respective political and cultural biases onto these animals. To paraphrase historian Kathleen Kete, when people spoke of dogs, they spoke about their times, and of themselves and others.6 A historical consideration of human associations with and discussion of dogs, therefore, sheds light on relations between people and canines, but it also opens new perspectives on relations among humans in the past and present. This book’s focus on dogs reveals something about the human that histories that are primarily concerned with people do not.

“A Dog Map of the World”

In her influential books about English attitudes toward animals in the nineteenth century, Harriet Ritvo has explored the complex interconnections of dog symbolism, dog breeding, and Victorian nationalism. While suggestive, her analysis of the English relationship with dogs and, for that matter, with all domestic animals is largely limited to the British Isles and pays scant attention to England’s vast global empire.7 Ritvo persuasively argues that the intense enthusiasm for the breeding and keeping of dogs in Britain was primarily fueled by domestic class anxieties. This is true, but empire mattered too. The imperial world and its human and canine population served as an additional foil to domestic class concerns in discussions about “pure-blooded” pedigreed dog breeding and civilized modes of dog keeping. Just as they brought the animals of empire home for display in zoos and as hunting trophies, English Victorians took to the imperium their enthusiasm for pets and particularly for the keeping of purebred dogs, and that process, in turn, influenced discussions about dogs in the metropole. Likewise, continental European powers and the United States transplanted these practices to their respective colonies, and that shaped the discourse of dog enthusiasts in the metropole. As a result, by the late nineteenth century, an imaginary canine geography had come into being, mirroring the imperial map of the human world. Because the culture of dog keeping and enthusiasm for dog breeding flourished over the same span of time that Western colonialism covered the planet, there was no part of the world that escaped the imposition of this canine cartography.

As in other societies, the inhabitants of the British Isles had closely interacted with canines from the beginning of recorded history, but as elsewhere, the keeping of dogs for companionship and amusement was almost completely isolated to those of the highest social rank. In early modern Britain the lower classes used canines as working dogs—for labor such as pulling, herding, and hunting—and regarded those animals with little sentimentality. By contrast, the upper classes, and most prominently, royalty and nobility, lavished affection on nonworking pets such as hounds and lapdogs, and, as a result, these dogs came to enjoy considerable status, thanks to the exalted position of their owners.8

Although the nineteenth-century British middle-class enthusiasm for dogs did not necessarily represent a complete departure from the past or from other societies, it radically changed the character of dog keeping in Britain and, eventually, the world over. The urban professional and business classes yearned to associate with their established social betters, the rural upper-class, and to differentiate themselves from their lower-class fellow city dwellers. As Ritvo observes, the urban middle class desired a “stable, hierarchical society, where rank was secure and individual merit, rather than just inherited position, appreciated.”9 The dog fancy provided one avenue to fashion such a society and changed dog keeping in at least three ways that were related to both unease about class and arrogance regarding British imperial exploits. First, the keeping of dogs primarily as pets, a practice borrowed from the upper echelons of society, spread throughout the middle classes in the early nineteenth century.10 Adopting practices such as the acquisition of expensive dogs and pampering them with a variety of new products not only allowed the upwardly mobile classes to emulate the supposed sophistication of their social superiors but also enabled them to dissociate themselves from the urban masses. Such dog-keeping...

Table of contents

• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Canine Imperialism
• 1. The Native Dog and the Colonial Dog
• 2. Civilizing Canines; or, Domesticating and Destroying Dogs
• 3. Fascism’s Furry Friends: The “Loyal Dog” Hachikō and the Creation of the “Japanese” Dog
• 4. Dogs of War: Mobilizing All Creatures Great and Small
• 5. A Dog’s World: The Commodification of Contemporary Dog Keeping
• Notes
• Bibliography