Bittersweet Infamy - #101 - Hachikō, Stay

Episode Date: June 16, 2024

Taylor tells Josie about Hachikō, the Japanese dog who became a national icon by loyally waiting for his long-dead master, and other very good boys of note. Plus: the long, curly tale of the feral hogs of Ossabaw Island, and the unusual attempts to preserve and study them.

Welcome to Bitter Sweet and Food. I'm Taylor Basso. And I'm Josie Mitchell. On this podcast, we share the stories that live on in infamy. The strange and the familiar. The tragic and the comic. The bitter. And the sweet. Are you going to bring me a story about Dalmatians? Close. Where's Halle? Are you gonna bring me a story about Dalmatians? Close! Really?

The psychic link is strong, the psychic link is strong. Well, it was 101, so. Oh, that might be why! Oh, that's very, maybe that's why. The psychic link within your brain is pretty strong. Oh dear, maybe I was just subconsciously affected. Not Dalmatians per se, but something of the sort. Something of the sort. Hold on to your leashes and collars, let's say. Oh, good thing Bee Man's here.

Absolutely. Batman, the official dog of bittersweet infamy is chilling on the bed. How's he doing? He's looking at me very skeptically. He is. He's a hard one to read, isn't he? He's a very enigmatic soul batman. He's a hard one to see on a screen. He's just a little black hole of light. Well, Iris, I hear that it's really difficult to get black animals adopted because they're difficult to photograph. That... I've heard that, yeah. Yeah. Which is so stupid. Which is so sad because like, my favorite, my favorite anemo in the entire kingdom is a black cat. Aww! Yeah, just a little squish.

Yeah, maybe a cappy bar in there too, but they don't give those away at the pound. No, they don't. Not any of the ones that I've been to. Yeah, we're gonna have a little Bee Man, some Bee Man Russell noises, snorts, guffaws. That's fine. That's perfect for this episode. Okay, good, good. Does Batman have any dog friends at the dog park?

No, he has like, like neighbor friends and like, Hazel is a really good bud of his who's a dog of our friends and well Millhouse is definitely like a primo. Him and Millhouse are definitely cousins because they like love and still tolerate each other. Do you want to explain Millhouse to our listeners? Millhouse is a very dear friend, Rachel's dog. And Rachel is the sister to Chelsea, who's also my good friend. And Millie is kind of a little bit bigger

than Bee Man, white. I think Millie is like a, some Schnauzer poodle stuff going on too. Yeah, Schnauzery, Schnauzery. Similar vibe to Batman. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And Chelsea is a, long time listeners will know Chelsea and I

joined either side of the ghost room at the wedding hotel. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. To tie it all back together. So I guess like, here's a question I guess, what do you favor in a dog? Cause you sort of ended up with Batman by circumstance. What sorts of traits do you admire in a dog

in terms of like the physicality of a dog? Do you like a mop? Do you like a handsome boy? Do you like a big boy? Do you like a small girl? Like, what do you like? I don't know, I like mutts. You're like big punisher. You don't discriminate, you regulate every shade of the ass. Yeah, it's true. That's putting on a business card, it's true. I like mutts. I think that I would be a mutt. Like

I think that if I were a dog, I would be a mutt. Yeah, I would too. You'd be some kind of water dog. A water mutt, yeah. Yeah, thank you. No, I never thought I was a dog, I would be a mutt. Yeah, I would too. You'd be some kind of water dog. A water mutt, yeah, yeah, thank you. No, I never thought I was a small dog fan until Bee Man. There's a beauty to the small dog, they're very portable. Yes. They don't shit big, which is like, I love, if I could have my jugglers, I would have a Great Dane

and like a hired person to clean up after the Great Dane. Yeah, yeah, that's very, that's very fair. Yeah, and in terms of like trying to corral them or because I really don't like subjecting people who are scared of dogs to a dog and sometimes it just happens because I have my dog. But that's a nice thing about having a small dog is like if they're in the way or if they're kind of scaring someone or if they're just kind of being unruly you just scoop pick them up. Yeah. And that's that. Spiral that bitch into a garbage can, into a weed. Exactly. Salt slam. It rolls off down the street on its own. It's fantastic. Yeah. So how about those melties? Oh, yeah, baby. Yeah. So how about those melties? Oh, yeah, baby

Re-review mirror that was the first 100 episodes. I know now we're in episode 101. We're very excited To embrace the new era and if you want to embrace the new era with us There's a couple things you can do you can leave us a review It's been a while since we've gotten like a good review when I say a good review I mean like please leave us a good review Like don't if you're gonna leave us a bad review just like actually don please leave us a good review. Like don't, if you're gonna leave us a bad review, just like actually don't leave us a bad review. Email it to us privately so we can learn and improve. But don't, don't, don't affect the star rating, babe. Yeah. These are uber rules. Welcome to our uber. Listen, the gig economy is a killer. You can plug your music in in the aux, no one's listening to the podcast.

The other thing that you can do is you can join us over at ko-fi.com, that's coffee.com slash bittersweetinfamy. The Melty's after party is free for everyone, that's just kind of us going behind the scenes talking about, you know, favorite moments, how the Melty's got made, etc. A really fun episode. If you haven't listened, go back and listen. We really did put a lot of work into it. Yeah. Number 100. 100 good balls. Number 100, baby.

You knew it was important. You knew it was important because it had two zeros at the end. And then the other thing that you can enjoy is we are going to be covering either late June or early July. We need to figure out the schedule. We're going to be covering the movie May, December for Bittersweet Film Club. May, December, of course, about the real life case of the Mary Kay Letourneau teacher sexual assault scandal.

I watched it last night. Did you? Okay, okay, okay. Well, I have not, so don't say it. We're in fact, maybe I'll watch it after this podcast because after this, I was gonna clean my house anyway I thought what should I put on? You should do yeah, and then subscribe become a coffee subscriber monthly subscriber, and you can listen as well

Okay, okay, did you prefer me or December? I don't tell me I want to judge for myself Okay. They're both good months. They're both good months. Okay. Oh man. I know, and it's strange to like be back to a regular episode after the like a different it feels like a long time that we've been in Melty's land. We've been trapped on a gum ball float in a melting ice cream river for a long time.

But now we're back on firm chocolatey ground. It's all desserts in this, in the middle. Just take yourself there. Running rivers of cream soda, you know all that good stuff. We are back and it's good to do like you say a good firm terra firma episode. Yeah, I agree. I really like that. Can I give you a Memphis? It's been a while. It's been a while! Yeah. I love all your language of terra firma and rivers, oceans. I know it was dessert themed, but just imagine the actuality of it. But imagine it wasn't and it's very relevant. Got it, got it, got it, got it. The mind meld.

It's on, it's on. So, for this Mimphimus, this little warm up to our main story, for those of you who are just joining us at 101 over here. Yeah, no better time to jump in. These are going to be the best 100 episodes yet. Yeah, it's bittersweet 101. Welcome, welcome to introductory. Perfect. Yes, introductory course.

Welcome to your crash course. Yeah. I'm going to tell you the story of this incredible pig heist. Is there any other kind? Is there any other kind? Yeah, that's true. This is the story of trying to save a very special pig from a remote island off the coast of Georgia called Asaba Island. Yeah.

Interesting, interesting. And whereabouts is Georgia for those of us? I mean, I obviously know, but for those of us who don't. Georgia is a state in the southern United States and it has... This is very important because I thought you meant the country of Georgia and Europe. There we go. There we go. Or Asia. I don't know if it's a Eurasian country, I don't know if it's Europe or Asia, but either way it's not this, this is the state.

This is the state, this is the state, peaches, Coca-Cola, Atlanta. Right, Freaknik. Ossipa Island is about 30 minutes away, if you're driving by car, if you're traveling, from Savannah, from like the core of Savannah. So I say remote, but it's a barrier island off the coast. And Georgia has this little clip of coast on the Atlantic right above Florida

and right below South Carolina. And so all along that coastline are these long, skinny, essentially just deposits of sand that are called Barrier Island. American, like East Coast American islands are cool. They are cool. I'd like to go to one sometime. Yeah. It's a very like southern gothic kind of situation. Yes, very much so, very much so. So these pigs that live on Asaba Island are called the Asaba hog. And they are feral hogs. They're essentially feral hogs. And we already know from the podcast that I kind of dig a feral hog.

So yes, we all know kind of the connotation of the feral hog, which is an invasive species in the US and how that warrants the ownership and use of an assault rifle. You can't take out your feral hogs without an AK. Can you wake up in the morning without coffee? Hell no. Can you take out your feral hogs without an AK?

Hell no. You take them out, you go home, you fire out a shit because of that coffee. It's true. The system works. God bless America. Yeah. Dun, dun, dun, God Bless America. Even though the acipa hogs are feral hogs, invasive species, there's still something important about them that is worth saving. And there's

a few things. They're droppings. I'm going to say they're droppings. I'm calling droppings. I'm calling droppings early. But the way you just reacted, it doesn't seem like the answer. Call your droppings. I was excited to offer. Fine, fine. What is it then? What is it? So what makes these pigs so dang special? Some pig. Stop it. Did you like that? My little shark? I did. I did. I did. I did. I did. That was cute. Think about that. I did. I'm going to. Thank you. What makes them so special is kind of tied to Asoba Island. So let's get a little backstory on these bad boys. Enhance. Enhance. Enhance. Thank you. Yeah. Of course. Asoba Island, it's about 13 miles long, 26,000 acres. And it's as we were talking about those, like, it's like this long skinny island that runs

parallel to a coast. And they're really, because they're essentially just kind of sandbars, they're very temperamental. And they erode and change pretty quickly. And the ones that are in place, and there's lots along the the Texas coast as well, like Galveston is on a barrier island. So cities have been built on them. There's a lot of marshes and essentially the idea is that the ocean side is like a full, like it can be a long stretch of sandy beach with rolling waves coming in, but behind the barrier island is typically like marshland or bays. So essentially like it's a barrier. It protects the mainland in some way. It is not

currently an inhabited island, but there has been evidence of human habitation there for over 5,000 years. Like pottery shards, this kind of thing. When the Spanish conquistadors landed in North America, specifically like in Florida and then kind of worked their way up the eastern seaboard. The Guale tribe was living there. The Spanish conquistadors came to do their little horrible visit. The worst host guests there is, yep. It's true. And they brought with them these European hogs. And the idea, and I think I

mentioned this in the previous episode about feral hogs. They are meant to be pantries for the conquistadors. Like they have the hogs with them, they trot along with their roving parties. They shoot them, they eat them. The end. Except the hogs kind of went crazy and hogs can reproduce really quickly. These damn invasive species. Yes. And so they just kind of like took over. And that was the case on Asaba Island as well.

For a while there, as the US was getting started, and especially in the South with all the slavery, there were a few different plantations where over 150 enslaved people worked on Asaba Island. In fact, at one point there was an indigo plantation there to like process that blue, blue natural dye. In 1924, though, a Dr. Henry Norton Torrey and Nell Ford Torrey, you might hear that Ford because this family is from Detroit, Michigan. Ah, you mean a big money. They moved down to Georgia looking for a soul to steal. Yeah, as you do as you do when you have so much money.

They had their daughter, Eleanor Sandy. Her nickname is Sandy Tory West. And when they moved there, all of these real estate agents were knocking on their hotel door or however, and saying like, you gotta look at this, you gotta look at that. These huge mansions and like, oh my gosh, you can buy this, you can buy that.

And apparently, Nell Ford Tori was like, God, these real estate agents are really bugging me. How do I get them off my back? And her husband said, just low ball them. Just say some incredibly low price and then they'll just walk away. She's like, oh, okay, I'll try that. And so a real estate agent comes up one day and says, I want to sell you Asaba Island. It's this beautiful...

This is the one that she decides to try it on. She's like, I'll give you $150,000 for this entire island. And the real estate agent's like, sold! Let's go! Maybe as long as I get that 10%, I don't really care. Yeah! The island hadn't had any permanent residents on it for quite a while. It was just like, burned in a hole in the real estate

pocket. The family's like, oh shit, we just, let's do it. Let's buy an island because that's what you do. And so then they built a 15-room pastel pink Spanish-style mansion in the center of the island. OK, OK. Living like Barbie's Barbie's Island Dream House. This house had a 14 by 12 plate glass window, like all one sheet of glass, which is not that impressive today, maybe especially living in Vancouver, where it's just like it's city of glass. Yeah. But at the time, the mid-20s, that was the largest pane of glass in North America.

Ooh, cool. I know. Distinction. Of these modern houses, I'm very taken by a modern house on an island. And then there were non-modern house on an island. Yeah, and like gazelle heads on the walls and like exposed rafter beams

and like gorgeous art and bathtubs and you know like the whole thing. Living the way that the better half of us do the financially better half of us do let's say. Yes yes yeah financially better. So Sandy their daughter she comes to love the island. She loves all the animals on the island. She loves this big, gorgeous house. She particularly loves these special Sicilian donkeys that live on the island. Sure. Yeah. There are loggerhead turtles, which are very special little guys. And of course, the Acapa hog hogs whom she loves dearly as well. In fact there's like a balcony in the house where supposedly she would throw

food down to them and they all knew because pigs are so smart they all knew when she was around and they all knew like oh oh oh Sandy's throwing food. It's like Romeo and Juliet. Exactly yeah. It's just like Romeo and Juliet. It's just like Romeo and Juliet, yeah. She lived there and loved the island so much that with her family's fortune, she started an artist residency in the 60s.

I love when they do that. I love when they do that. So she did that for a few years and then the residency kind of morphed into more of an interdisciplinary situation where she was inviting scholars of all types to come, including artists. And one such scholar was a researcher named Dr. I. Lear Brisbane. And Dr. Brisbane was there on the island and was taking notice of these pigs and was really intrigued by them because they seemed different from other,

certainly domesticated pigs, but even other wild feral pigs. So he ran some testing on them, did his little research thing, and found out that they are a nearly exact genetic echo of the long lost European ancestor to the American feral pig, the black pig of the Canary Islands. So okay. El cerdo negro de las canarias. Muchas gracias. That pig does not exist anymore in its European entity. So this is like one of its direct ancestors.

So the genetic material is very important and very unique. So they're special in that way. Now Sandy, her fortune starts to run a little low as fortunes do sometimes. She had to cut the pane of glass into smaller panes of glass and sell it off bit by bit. Yes, yeah. Though she was pretty resolute that she wanted the island to not be this tourist overrun, large resort, ruin all the ecology of this very special island. So what she decided to do was to sell the island for much lower than it was worth to the state of Georgia. Okay. And when she sold it to the

state of Georgia there was a very clear and purposeful clause that was in the sale and it was that Asaba Island shall only be used for natural scientific and cultural study, research, and education, and environmentally sound preservation, conservation, and management of the island's ecosystem." So, she's saying you can't build roads on here, you can't have huge hotels, you can't like run, you know, a jet ski business out of here. This is a learning place and like,

it's just for that purpose. Yes. So it is owned by the state of Georgia, which means that like all the beaches, anybody can access the beaches, but there's no causeway and there's no bridge to get to the island. So you can only access-

There's no infrastructure. Yeah, there's no, there's a few buildings, like there's the mansion that's kind of falling apart. But like on the island, I mean- But on the island, yeah. There's not a bridge, there's no, there's a few buildings, like there's the mansion that's kind of falling apart. But like on the island. But on the island. There's not a bridge. There's not a bridge. There's not a 7-Eleven.

There's no gas stations. There's, yeah. Yes. Yeah, exactly. Now, Sandy herself, she gets all timers and she in 2016 has to move off the island, which she's not very excited about, but she lives to the ripe old age of 108. Jesus, Sandy. I know.

I know. Good for you. Sandy, what's in that Asa'baa water? Certainly. Damn, it's feral hog shit. It's those magic droppings. I'm telling you. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, exactly. Sandy really wanted to make sure that the Asa'baa hogs were particularly taken care of, because she loved them so much. She had, like, the last generation of the pigs that she had. Her favorites were one called Lucky because it had escaped the talons of a hawk when it was a piglet. And the other one was named Paul Mitchell, which.

I don't know. He's one of ours then. I don't know why. He's like, he's part of our clan though. Yeah, gray hair. I don't know. I don't know what it was, but... Paul Mitchell.

So she thought that the hogs would be safe. I mean, she was also concerned about like all these various species of birds and salamanders and loggerhead turtles and all the fauna and flora, all of it. But the Department of Natural Resources, which, you know, through the state of Georgia, took over some of the regulation of the island, did not have the best intentions for the hogs on the island. Because... That can't be right.

That can't be right. They are invasive species. They are feral hogs. Sure, but they're contained, aren't they? They're contained, but... Do they swim? Actually, they can swim. Shit, gotta kill them.

Get an AK out. The Department of Natural Resources logic, which is pretty sound, is that they, as invasive species, they are destructive to other endangered species. So, for example, the loggerhead turtle, which is like this sea turtle that goes up onto the sand and lays its eggs and then says very precarious,

they hatch and it says very precarious, you know, crawl into the ocean. Yeah, you see them and you cheer them on, oh my God, little baby turtles, yay. Yeah, feral hogs eat the eggs. I would be a hypocrite to criticize them for that. I eat eggs. Do you eat turtle eggs. I would be a hypocrite to criticize them for that. I eat eggs. Do you eat endangered turtle eggs though?

If they had them at the store, I probably would. I'd give it a shot, you're right, yeah. If it was like, you know, gumball, clack, clack, clack, everything's the same but it's turtle eggs, you know? Yeah, so the DNR, the Department of Natural Resources, allows any visitors to the island to get a permit to hunt the Azabah hogs. Always, always, always killing the hogs, always killing the feral hogs.

And that industry is huge. People love to kill feral hogs and the AK-47s, the helicopters, Ted Nugent blowing them up. Yeah. Ted Nugent, I forgot. It's practically a national past time at this point. It's up there with the Blue Angels. Did the Blue Angels fly over the hog murder? I think so.

I think they did, yeah. So that original scientist who did the genetic testing on the hogs and found that they were so special, he writes a letter to the journal Science saying that they are looking to preserve this genetic material, preserve this breed of a sebop hog, and they need somebody to help because the DNR is trying to eradicate them. A scientist by the name of Michael Sturick, he reads this and he's very intrigued because in addition to the hogs being like this

unique ancestor echo, genetic echo, they also have a very high body fat ratio. So again, another another theme from your work. Yes, this is true. Yeah. Abnormally high body fat to body mass ratio. Yeah, yeah. No, that's exactly it. These hogs are a little bit smaller because sometimes we can call them like mainland feral hogs I suppose. They can be up to like 400, 500 pounds. They're huge. But the Asoba hogs are they hover around like a hundred pounds.

They're cute. They're so cute. And they have all of this body fat because they're surviving in an island habitat where there might be food and there might not be. It's very limited resources on an island. So they don't create insulin. They just have this body fat to live off of during the winter essentially. Now what's important about the fact that they have this high ratio of fat to body mass and that they don't create insulin and that they're somewhat similar in weight to a human is that they could hold the answer

to curing diabetes. JAYLEE I wondered. Interesting. In a humane way where their autonomy is respected, I'm sure. STURRICK Yes, yes, exactly. Exactly. JAYLEE Fingers crossed. STURRICK Uh-huh. Sturrick, he is a researcher in diabetes cures. His son was diagnosed with diabetes as a kid, and so it became kind of his life goal to do more research around diabetes. And he comes to the island and he's like, we have to get some of these hogs off of this island so

that they're not completely eradicated. We need to commit a hamburglary. That's good. That's good. Such as it is. Such as it is. Yes. Yes. I do.

I can't even laugh. It was just too good. Thank you. I was worried it was a little hammy, but... There we go. That one was not as good. That one was not as good, but I'll still use it. Yeah. We're here. Yeah, it's true. as good, but I'll still use it. Yeah.

We're here. Yeah, it's true. We're here on the island with the pigs. Yeah. So, Sturrock and Brisbane, it's 2002, so the island has already been handed over to the state of Georgia, and they get all of these types of permissions to do research on the island and they set these live traps for the pigs. They are trapping 97 live feral hogs and then they're like, okay, we are going

to take them to a research station at the University of Missouri because that's where their testing can happen. But the state of Georgia is very clear that you cannot take these hogs off this island to the mainland of Georgia because they're such an isolated population that they could hold all these different types of diseases. So I mean just think about all the different swine flu. So what they decide to do is they take their live pigs and they become pig doulas, essentially. They have them breed and then when the pigs are ready to be born, when the mama pigs are ready to give birth, they isolated them from the rest of the herd and helped these little pigs be born. And they did blood testing and because they were separated,

all the blood tests came back with absolutely no parasites, absolutely no diseases. And where they took them to separate them was they brought them to Sandy's mansion, the abandoned pink Spanish-style mansion in the middle of this southern Gothic island. That's a cool image. I mean, sad. Yeah. Sad. Parting is that sheet sorrow, right? Yeah, that's true. They were born in the bathtub. The abandoned mansion bathtub. That's very glamorous. Yeah. It's a very glamorous way for a pig to come into the world. It's true. So even then, the state of Georgia was like, mm-hmm, Still, no, you can't have these hogs on mainland Georgia soil. It's not gonna happen.

So they took a risk. They got a boat. The boat was called Eleanor, named after Sandy, the eccentric heiress of the island. You say eccentric, I say, you know what I mean? One woman's eccentric, another man's Tuesday night. Exactly. You know? Yeah. Exactly, exactly. Exactly. They take this boat,

they load 26 perfectly parasite free, very healthy young piglets. They put them on this boat, they get them to the mainland. There's a very special ramp where the pigs never touch Georgian soil and they get into a semi. The semi drives, high-tails it to the border. Boom, they're out of Georgia and they drive up to the University of Missouri and the pigs are there to be tested on. That's a shame. Hopefully. Humaneely. Yes. According to researcher Brisbane, he says, those little pig feet never touched the soil of the state of Georgia. So even though it was like against the law, tough on immigration. Yeah, they took a risk and kind of of like squeaked by this law. So this population of genetically pure Asoba hogs live in a research lab, which is a wonderful boon to science and medical research, but it is also a boon, my dear friend, to the culinary world because the Asova hog with its high rate of fat.

This isn't what Sandy wanted. It was one fucking delicious pig. Aymira, oh no. So some chefs and some pig farmers have gone to the research lab and have said like, can we take some and breed some for culinary purposes? And it has been allowed, it has been done so. And so populations of the Asoba pig have grown outside of research. Are they genetically pure, quote unquote? That's a question to be... But you can't even taste the difference.

Well that's the concern right is the taste. But apparently the meat has so much flavor because of all this fat. One food writer Peter Kaminsky in his book Pig Perfect, he describes the taste of Aseba pork as waves of exquisite porkitude. Wow. Yeah. And even though it is still a rarity, the Aseba pork, it has a devoted following among some of like the critically acclaimed and highly awarded James Beard and Michelin star chefs of the South. Cool. So, I mean, not cool for them. Right. Not cool for the pigs.

No, no. Sorry, Sandy. It wasn't supposed to go like this. You'd hate to see what they did to the bathroom too. I'm gonna keep us in the animal kingdom for this one, as I alluded earlier, but I'm gonna take us to a place that might not be the most intuitive spot for an animal type story. Okay, okay. I'm gonna take you to the biggest urban metropolis on the planet, Tokyo, Japan. Oh, okay. Biggest in terms of, I'm sure there's different ways to do biggest, don't come at me. Yeah, okay. And specifically I'm gonna take you to one of its busiest locations. Josie, do you know anything about the Shibuya Scramble? Oh my gosh, yes I do. Okay.

So what do you know about the Shibuya Scramble? When I was teaching in China, I was very lucky and the school that I worked for bought plane tickets for teachers to fly to and from home. I was in northern China and we always flew Japan Airlines and so I always stopped in Tokyo. I mean I made this trip maybe like four or five times. I guess it would have to be an even number. I made this like six times or six times and on the last time I asked, could I stay, could I, could my layover in Tokyo be about a week instead of a night? So I got to visit Japan for that week as I was coming home.

I didn't know that. Yeah. I spent, it wasn't... When did you go to Japan? After... We're learning all about each other. Yeah, it was in, it must have been 2015, like June of 2015. So I was by myself just kind of traveling through Tokyo, which large metropolis area, it is a very good city to travel by yourself because there's just like all the restaurants, they're not weird when you eat by yourself. It's very easy to navigate.

So much is happening. You're a drop in the bucket. Everybody was so kind and respectful and kind of gives you your space. And it was really nice. And I went to the Shibuya Scramble and I was like, and I don't think it was like on a map and I'm like, I'm going to go. I think I just kind of was like, oh, I'm here. I'm at this huge

intersection. The inertia of the city brought you to Shibuya Scramble. Yes, yeah. I mean, I think it does kind of funnel you to it. And what happens is like, the street lights are in, you know, in a in a circuit that allows the traffic to move through. And then a certain part, at a certain point, all the lights are red, the cars cannot move at all, and the idea is that all pedestrians can go anywhere they want in the intersection, like in the middle of the street. It's not this like four way situation.

No, there's four ways and then there's an additional diagonal crossing down the middle. Yeah, okay, yes. Yes. Yeah. But it is like a scramble. Like everybody just kind of like goes everywhere, everywhere else. Explodes outwards.

This has been called the busiest pedestrian intersection in the world. As many as 3,000 people cross it every two minutes. In a given week, it might experience 1.5 million pedestrians. And it truly is like, you have this sense that like, you're in very much like the most like commercial and metropolitan. I can't speak to how it used to be,

but certainly from the 90s onwards, it's full of high rises and billboards and light screens. It's the worst place in the world to be hung over, which I have been deadly. I have to say, when I tried to go through the shivanya scramble, there was such a crush of humanity that I couldn't make my way to the diagonal. Like I had to get from like one corner

to the caddy corner over there. And I couldn't maneuver through the sea of people. So I just ended up going to one corner and then I had to wait again. And then I got to, so I just did a traditional intersection. I couldn't. Not everyone is meant for the Shibuya Scramble, Josie. And I am not, I am one of those people. It's me.

If we're talking about the Shibuya Scramble. Right next to the Scramble is the Shibuya Station. It's like a big train station, big, big, big, big train station with many entrances and exits. And in fact, I once got lost there with my phone dead and I didn't know how to get in touch with my two traveling companions.

And I thought, well, there's only one obvious thing to do here. I'll go and wait by Hachiko. Oh. Do you know Hachiko? I don't. I just made a noise like I do. I can tell you I can tell you exactly what side of the Shibuya Scramble you run because Hachiko is right on the other side. So on the other side right immediately pouring out from one of the exits of Shibuya station, on a pedestal there is a bronze statue that was made in 1948 by an artist named Takeshi Ando and it is of an Akita dog named Hachiko.

Cutie! You heard that, B-Man? I heard that, Mom. The gate is actually called Hachiko-guchi, which means the Hachigo Gate. Cute. And the Hachiko statue is considered one of Tokyo's and Japan's generally most iconic and well-known pieces of public art. Okay, okay.

And specifically, the dog that it depicts is best known for accompanying his master to that gate every day and accompanying him home from that gate every day. And then when that master suddenly died of a brain hemorrhage at work, coming to that same gate every day for almost 10 years to wait for him. I know. This is a tearjerker, folks. Baby eyes! This is a sad one. Would you do that

for me? And so that ends- it's an interesting thing that there's this explosion of activity immediately next to where this dog sort of like stays and waits for his master. Waits so patiently and with so much stillness. Yes. Yes. It's a really interesting juxtaposition. In fact, why don't I show you the statue? Aww. The dog is so cute, but so are you. Thank you. I looked very cute on that trip. But let's not distract from Hachiko here. Okay. You can see. So this so this is for context this statue is always attended by a lineup of people waiting to get photos with Hachiko like i had to wait in line to take a picture with Hachiko but it's well worth it yeah obviously very good dog yeah and you can see kind

of by the little the way that the the patina of the thing is a little bit different around his legs and his uh little floppy ear that you can tell that that's where people tend to touch. Oh yeah the smoothness of the of the bronze is there. And so yeah today I I guess I'm just going to be telling you the story of this dog friend Hachiko and his owner and I'm going to be telling you about other kind of noteworthy dogs of valor and i kind of want to dive into this like the trope of like the very loyal dog and why this is such a resonant story yeah and what what kind of that says about us in our relationship with dogs and our relationship with ourselves yeah the lassie the like yeah rin tin tin the littlest hobo if you're up. So let's talk a little bit about the Akita Inu, which is the type of dog that Hachiko is.

And it is important that he is this type of dog because this is a purebred Japanese dog. Oh. A very dignified, courageous, known for their loyalty, which the story of Hachiko has obviously only fed into. Right, yes, yeah, yeah. They were developed in the early 17th century in the Akita Prefecture of Northern Japan. The story goes, and this is a very old story, so you'll forgive me if I don't have photos to prove it.

That's fine. But the story goes that the emperor banished some nobleman that he had an issue with to the prefecture. And this is the northernmost province of Honshu Island. So this is like basically getting sent out to the sticks. And the nobleman was basically given some provincial post there to kind of just do, just while his days away, right? And so as it happens, this aristocrat who's been exiled, he's a dog guy, and he basically convinced

all the barons that we need to start breeding these large hunting dogs. And this is, generations of this selective breeding produce the Akita. It's a spitz dog, thick double coat, curly tail, pricked ears, although Hachiko notoriously has one that's a bit floppy. Powerful hunter, strong work ethic, and what is one of my sources described as a stout heart a Stout heart nice a stout heart. It sounds like Scottish almost stout hurt astute hurt There we go. Yeah This says I at Sue Sakuraba who is the author of a children's book called Hachi obviously about Hachiko

Akita dogs are calm sincere intelligent and brave, and brave, and obedient to their masters. On the other hand, it also has a stubborn personality and is wary of anyone other than its master. So, man's best friend, right? It's the dog that you get like, this dog is about you, especially if you treat it well. In Japanese tradition, if a child is born, you give the parents an Akita figurine and that means happiness and long life. It's like a good blessing. In 19, this is just now we're getting into like Akita fun facts. I'll give you, you're not going to get it, but I would love if you could. The year is, it's going to be like the late 20s or the early 30s.

Who brought the first Akita back to the United States? It's a woman. She visited Japan and she got it as a gift. And she's famous. But not like famous like a movie star. Very hard to describe what category of celebrity is she is. She's very much her own thing. Amelia Earhart!

We were looking for Helen Teller. Oh shit dog, what? She brought the first Akita back to the USA in 1927, or so is credited. This is right around the time that a Japanese National Breed Club is found in 1931. The Akita is designated by the Japanese government as a national icon.

Oh. And then in a post Helen Keller era, they caught on after World War II because returning GIs would bring them back from Japan. Oh, okay, okay. And then another thing that I really want to underscore because it becomes important to the story of Hachiko himself is this idea of like purebred Japanese. Hachiko is the Japanese citizen in the metaphor, right?

Yeah. Says, Professor Christine Yano of the University of Hawaii. Hachiko represents the ideal Japanese citizen with his unquestioning devotion, loyal, reliable, obedient. This is a- this is an empire. This is a country run by an emperor, right? And so notionally, if we the people are Hachiko, who is the professor, the emperor? Yes. And even if you don't want to take it that literally, Hachiko basically is a stand-in for all of the kind of like,

a lot of the traits that are kind of valorized in the Japanese cultural identity. Yeah, I see that, I get that. Yeah, hard work and willingness to put others before yourself maybe, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So Hachiko himself, the dog himself. Yeah!

He is born... Adorable. Yeah, he's born adorable. He definitely is born adorable. No, you know what? Puppies look weird. They need like six weeks before they start looking kind of like dogs. Oh yeah, they have their like kind of bulbous heads. Fetus, slormy kind of little guys. Yeah, it's no disrespect, just not for me. Hachiko himself born November 1923.

The date is in debate. Apparently the midwife wasn't prompt with the birth certificate. So himself born November 1923, the date is in debate. Apparently the midwife wasn't prompt with the birth certificate, I don't know. I get that, it's okay. No worries, he was born in a barn in the city of Odate in the mountainous northeastern Akita prefecture, original home of Akitas.

Oh wow. Home town boy makes good, right? Yeah, yeah, big time. Go paws. And Go Paws! He was born to dogs belonging to a farmer named Saito Yoshikazu and I should say that I think that there I had the Japanese names the right way where it was last name first but I don't think anything else will hold to that so I like sorry about that. That's okay by me. The year Hachiko was born, Hidesaburo Ueno, a university agricultural professor and dog lover, a university agricultural professor of some note, like a big name in the agricultural

civil engineering world, let's say, working out of the Imperial University of Tokyo. He's also owned 16 dogs in his lifetime. So he gets he gets Hachiko as a gift from a former student Masayoshi Omatsu, who's the head of arable land cultivation section of the Akita Prefecture. So a student, a well situated student, avails upon himself to get Ueno. Ueno is his surname. U-E-N-O. We'll just call him Ueno. To get Ueno this dog. Cute! Way better than like, I don't know, like a gift card or something. An apple gift card. They didn't have them at the time. Yeah, true. Yeah. They didn't have them.

You couldn't go to the genius bar back then. You just had to go to the actual bar and hope you met a genius, which are few and far between the bar. So Hachiko comes in again. He's this purebred So Hachiko comes in again, he's this purebred Japanese Akita Inu. At this time, sort of a dying breed. It's less and less. Oh, okay. Not right now, like right now, I think they're doing okay, but at this time in the story, they're kind of a dying breed. Hachiko himself and the statue of Hachiko are very instrumental in like, reigniting

the interest in and saving of this breed, because he was such a resonant and well-known figure. And so here we have this puppy, this very like sweet little puppy. And I've seen a couple of Hachiko movies because of this. And I will say it's a very like a princely little dog. It's a very dignified dog. It's not the kind of dog that's gonna like and bow and flip over to you and da da da da da.

It seems a little bit aloof in its demeanor, I would say. Like a little bit, like not a very emotive face, a very stoic kind of face dog. Okay, yeah. And he's 50 days old. He's all wrapped up in a rice bag, but that's all he's got. It's a long, grueling train journey. It's cold, it's disruptive.

This guy doesn't even know what's going on. It's a journey of about 600 kilometers, it's disruptive. This guy doesn't even know what's going on. It's a journey of about 600 kilometers or 373 miles. And so by the time he shows up to Ueno and his wife, Yai, who's also known as Yaeko, Sakano. The ko here, by the way, is you'll hear that suffix ko. Yeah. Hachiko's real name is Hachi. Yeah. But the ko, Yai, Yaeko, that's like a, it's like saying like, jyosita, you know what I mean? It's like a little suffix. A cute little sentiment suffix. Yeah. Yes, exactly, exactly. This dog shows up in really bad shape,

but they nurse him back to health over a period of about six months. They're real animal lovers and specifically Professor Ueno is a real animal lover, quoting Vicky Shigekuni Wong, who ended up producing the English-language version of the Hachiko story, which I'll tell you a little bit about later on, quote, Hachiko slept under Ueno's western-style bed, wrapped in fabric. In those days, it was rare to find dogs indoors. Hachiko became weaker and developed a fever, causing Ueno and his wife to bolster their efforts to nurse him back to health. They kept his head cool with ice bags and packed hot water bags beside his feeble little body." So they're really really nursing

this this little dog back to health and he does eventually heal. He does eventually get better. Yeah. They decide to name him Hachi which means eight in Japanese and if you find the character for an eight you can see it kind of looks like an Akita's paws and that's just the way his paws kind of bent so they named him Hachi because that's just the way his paws kind of bent. So they named him Hachi because of that. Very cute. Very cute. Even after he healed, the professor spoiled Hachi in a way that was outside the norm. Like, you know, not atypical of the time and place. Yeah. I mean, he did have two other dogs. He had two English pointers named John, J-O-H-N, and Esu, E-S-U. Cool. John and Hachiko got along fine.

Esu and Hachiko were apparently like not as cool. Oh, wow. I love a dog named John. It's a cool thing to do. It's very, especially if you're Japanese, it's a fun thing to do. I wonder who it was named after. Yeah.

So every day, Hachi, John, and Esu accompany Ueno to Shibuya train station. They see him off and then when the time came they go back and greet him to come home. They're not like chilling there all day, but they do kind of see him off. Yeah. It's very sweet. Yeah, that's really cute. And so they have a great little relationship, a great little pack dynamic,

and so it goes until May 21st, 1935. He's had Hachiko for 16 months only but they've clearly like really really bonded. Yeah, yeah, major bonding. Ueno dies of a cerebral hemorrhage while teaching his class. Really unfortunate, really one of those like awful kind of just random tragedies of life kind of deaths. And he only had Hachiko for 16 months? He only had Hachiko for 16 months and Hachiko would go on to wait nearly 10 years for him to get back. Oh my gosh! The period of time that they knew each other is like a fifth or less of the time that Hachiko would later wait for this man.

Whoa! A very powerful stuff. A very powerful connection. And so the story goes that after, you know, he doesn't necessarily know that the professor has died, but Hachiko is like not eating. He's very sullen. You can tell that he's very disturbed that the professor hasn't gotten back. And according to Hachiko biographer, Megumi Ito, they then hold awake at Ueno's home and Hachi smelled Dr. Ueno from the house and went inside the living room. He crawled under the coffin and refused to move.

Sorry folks, it's sad. After this, basically the story goes that Yaeko and Ueno were not legally married. Ueno was betrothed to a woman from some prominent family, but he decided to marry for love instead. He went with Yaeko. The family disapproved and Ueno and Yaeko were kind of like living somewhat in exile together in a sort of like a relationship that was like maybe not very socially approved of and maybe like kind of wasn't like the specifics

of it might not have been known in their circles do you know what i mean yeah drama you mean you're sucking it's always it's drama but it's like stupid it's stupid drama over shit that doesn't matter which always breaks my heart it's like when you find out these people these it's like when you find out that people like yeah i never spoke to my mother again because she couldn't handle that i married a protestant you know what i mean you're like what the are like, yeah, I never spoke to my mother again because she couldn't handle that I married a Protestant. You know what I mean? You're like, what the fuck? Who cares? Yeah, that's true.

That's very true. So when Ueno died, Yaeko had no legal rights to the house. So she had to go and live with an acquaintance and the arrangement was such that it was like, Hachiko was too big a dog for wherever she ends up living. Oh. And so she sends Hachiko to live with an acquaintance who ran a kimono store in Nihonbashi about six kilometers away. Okay. Hachiko obviously

keeps getting away and coming back to the station. Oh my gosh. So it keeps going gets handed off to this person back to Yaeko for a bit back to person. And eventually it's Ueno's gardener, Hikisaburo Kobayashi. He lives near the station. And so in the summer of 1925, he basically takes pity on Hachiko and just says like, look, come live with me. You can- Look, dog.

Look, dog, come live with me. And you can stay here nights and by day, you can just go and wait all day at Shibuya station where for all anyone knows at this point he's a stray dog. Like apparently the kids are like kicking him and people are drawing mustaches on him. Wait what? People are assholes to stray dogs in big cities in 1920 something. They didn't have diagnoses then.

Mustaches on him? Yeah they were very mean to poor Hachika. B-Man, you hear that? You hear that shit Batman? He already has a mustache. You can't draw a mustache on a mustache. He's like, why would you need to draw that on? Are you talking about Just For Men? What do you mean? There's also like, there's lots of vendors there

because this is like a big train entrance, right? There's all these vendors and apparently vendors would like throw water on him to like get away from here, you dog! And he would just go and like you know yeah wait for his master he's never coming back somewhere else and then what happens is one of Ueno students Hirokichi Saito recognizes Hachiko he ends up writing for a local newspaper called the Tokyo Asahi Shimbun and on on October 4th, 1932, they published a story in the paper,

a tale of a poor old dog patiently waiting for seven years for the dead owner. So this is seven years. This is the seven year mark, yeah. The seven year mark. And I will say, having watched a bunch of stories of Hachiko, the way in which they don't satisfy is it's impossible in a

limited format of the time that I have or the time that a movie has to depict how long that wait is, how repetitive, how many times he must have done that and how many times he must have had his heart broken in the process. Yeah. Yeah. Like when did he turn away when he's like, okay, well, I guess I'll try again tomorrow. Oh, tail between his legs. It's a heartbreaker. Yeah. It's a heartbreaker. And of course, he's getting he's getting older and shabbier as this goes on.

Yeah. We've honored the days when he was getting swaddled to sleep by Professor Ueno. Now it's like up until we get to Shibuya station. I'm sure all of his owners and stuff are very nice to him, but it's not what he wants, right? I mean, the dogs out there with a mustache drawn on them, that's just rude. That's a hard life. That's so good. Yeah.

It changes with the publication of this article. Now, if he's a hero, we get lots of visitors, lots of donations, celebrity friends, artistic tribute. Okay, good. Yeah. Homeless dogs everywhere start getting treated a lot better broadly. There's a little bit of a Hachiko effect because now that we've like humanized and like sympathized with this poor dog, like we can kind of-

If Hachiko is drawn through these streets to wait for his dead owner, then like this little guy or that other guy, like what are they up to? Yeah, yeah, I get that. Yeah. Maybe this dog is just a hero dog fallen on hard times, just like Hachiko, right? Yeah, yeah, true enough. And so the Hachiko, right? Yeah, true enough. And so the Hachiko Gucci sculpture, the one by the Shibuya train station, that is made by a sculptor, Teruando, in 1933. He visits Hachiko and he sees him for the first

time at the station. He's very moved, of course, by the dignity and the solemn loyalty of this dog, right? He sees Hachiko and he decides he's going to create this bronze tribute for the Imperial Fine Arts Academy exhibition. Wow. In 1934, the statue was erected in front of the ticket gate of Shibuya Station with a poem engraved on a placard with the title, Lines to a Loyal Dog. When this sculpture was dedicated, Professor Ueno's grandkids visited and Hachiko himself was there to kind of gaze at his own likeness and bronze. I wonder if he like comprehended that that was him.

No, I don't think he did. I don't, it was a bit high for that. He was a little, he's a little guy. Not a little guy, but you know, dog size. Yeah, a statue on a pedestal, yeah. In early March of 1935, Hachiko starts to seek out private rooms and some vendors that he's friendly

with, just kind of gently sniffling around. A lot of people think that was him saying goodbye. March 8, 1935, Hachiko dies at age 13. One of the sources that I have here quoted that as equivalent to 90 in human years. That sounds about right. He waited in vain for his master for nine years, 9 months, and 15 days. What a heartbreaker. Oh yeah, totally.

I would have gotten remarried by then. Totally. You'd be like, who's this lady who runs the kimono shop? That sounds fun. Silk, you know? Ooh, a little dog kimono? I could get into that. Yeah. Um, Hachiko's death was front page news. Oh my gosh, yeah.

A funeral was held with like many prayers and eulogies. His statue in the days afterwards was a very popular destination for thousands of mourners. Professor Ueno's wife, Yaeko, came to place flowers and black and white ribbons on the statue. Oh wow, yeah. In 1944, during World War II, the Hachiko statue was melted down to support the war efforts. Oh! The one that's there now isn't the original, and in fact the original artist, Teruando, was killed during an air raid.

Oh man. In 1948, his son Takeshi Ando replicated the bronze statue on behalf of his father and on behalf of Hachiko. And again, the statue is known as like a very pivotal thing in saving the Akita breed from extinction. No, that makes sense. Especially like in like a 1945 kind of like post-World War thought, you know what I mean? Yeah. Where we're kind of rebuilding, we're rebuilding a country, we're rebuilding a culture, a population.

The fundraiser to have the statue rebuilt. And again, remember that this is post-war Japan. So a lot of people are very hard hit. They raised 800,000 yen, which is worth about 4 billion yen today. That's about 28 million dollars US circa 2023. Oh my goodness. So the people were very, were and are very in on Hachiko. Yeah they're like get that stack you fucking back. I need my hack. We need something to touch when we go across the scramble. Yeah. He was his his this is a little bit morbid and I didn't know this. His pelt was stuffed and

mounted. He is still visible at the National Museum of Nature and Science in Tokyo. It's not a bad taxidermy. I saw a picture of it. Looks like I'm right. Okay. Okay. He's with two other like taxidermied hero dogs of note with their whole own stories too. So it's the hero dog corner of the museum. Wait, whatever happened to John and Isu? They weren't- Not famous. Not famous. Okay. Because they weren't as loyal, they found other bitches. Okay. Figuratively and literally, I'm sure. Yeah, okay, fair. Well, as for Hachiko though, the non-taxidermied part of him was cremated. He was interred next to Professor Ueno at Aoyama Cemetery in Minato, Tokyo.

And this is the part where your head, if you believe in an afterlife, one that dogs get anyway, they run together, right? And he gets off the train and there's Hachiko waiting at the station and they run up and reunite, right? And if that reunion need be made sweeter, how about this? Poor Yaeko Sakano, she died in 1961 because of the various customs around, you know, the scandalous nature of her relationship with Professor Ueno. She was buried elsewhere, but after many long years, in 2013, her ashes were later added to the gravesite as well so now all three of them, Yaeko the professor and Hachiko have been reunited in depth. Whoa!

That's the thrust of Hachiko but that's not the only famous dog of no famously loyal or famously steadfast devoted man's best friends best friends, right? Like we're in the, we're in rarefied air of truly the best of the best loyal dogs. Would you like to hear about some of the other great loyal dogs in the world? Not in as, not in as much depth, but I've got like a little bit of a flyover on famously loyal dogs. Awwww, is Bee Man in it? Bee Man's the end question. I bring Batman up at the end. Consider whether Batman would do this for you if the circumstances dictated it.

That was my first question in my mouth and when I turned to him I was like, would you do that for me? Don't answer yet, but like, pensad en eso, okay? Okay. So in the meantime I'm gonna take you to Borgo San Lorenzo, Italy, it's in Florence, which is in Tuscany. We're just jet-setting. Love under the Tuscan sun. Yeah. Between a man and a dog. And it's not actually the Tuscan sun, it's like actually pretty bad weather it seems like. Oh. It's November 1941, we're very much in the thick of World War II. Carlo Soriani, he's a brick kiln worker. He's on his way home from work to the village of Lucco where he lives, where he finds a black and white mutt on a ledge by an icy river.

He's in very bad shape, this dog. So obviously he scoops up the pup, nurses him back to health, names him Fido. And again, there's very much something in this like nursing them back to health. Yeah. Fido follows Carlo to his bus stop every day for two years until, and it's again, I got bad news for those of you out there, the few of you who are investing in the humans in

these stories. Don't do it. I'm sorry, but if there's a dog in the story, it's like, there's your main character. Everyone just kind of fades into the back on that one. And on that note December 30th 1943 Carlo goes to work and gets killed by an allied bombing really puts into a perspective the futility of war how many of these characters are just getting killed by random bombings eh? Fido shows up to that same bus stop waiting for his human to get back every day for the ensuing 14 years over 5,000 times. Oh my goodness, Fido.

And it's sort of the same upward path. The story spreads until it reaches a journalist, gets covered in the newspaper La Nazione, and now all of a sudden we've got like a famous dog. Fido was written up in Time Magazine, quote, "'The mayor of Lucco himself decreed that Fido should henceforth live tax-free as the only legally unlicensed dog in Italy.

He has set an example of fidelity to our village,' said his honor, and deserves to be placed on the list of Lucco's honored citizens. Passed away in 1958, buried outside the cemetery where Carlo rests, which damn let him in. I know it's a human cemetery, but he's a good boy. I wonder if that's why the name Fido is so bedrock as a dog name, you know? I have the answer for you. Oh, fantastic. This is one of the reasons. So first of all, appropriately enough, Fido from the Latin, fidelity, loyalty, right? Yeah,

exactly. Yeah, you said fidelity. I was like, oh, that's probably where Fido comes from. Yeah, Fido. Yeah, so this and earlier on Abraham Lincoln had a dog named Fido. Oh, okay. Which probably had a lot to do with it too. Well, you know, coming from all angles, it'll do a thing. If you don't like Fido, which it seemed like you did, so I don't know why I need to frame it that way, but maybe you hated Fido.

Just give me some layers. Give me some layers. Let me tell you about Wagya. So Wagya, and I don't know if I'm pronouncing it, my Marathi isn't as good as it used to be but I apologize for any errors in pronunciation. Yeah exactly. He's the most apocryphal of these dogs which is to say that we're not 100% sure if he really existed. Because now we're going back to the 1600s. And so the story goes exactly like Batman knows. He's like, that bitch is fake. I don't know him. Where's his grandma? Who are his people?

Shivaji Maharaj, he dies. He's a Maratha king and we're talking the Maharashtra region of Western India. After Shivaji's death, the dog, Wagya, is said to have thrown himself on the funerary pyre of his master. Oh my. And so this is seen as a- oh yeah, he's very dramatic, this dog. Yeah. And so this is seen as a great act of love and devotion. For me, it's maybe like a dog who doesn't understand what's happening. Yeah.

But a statue was erected in the province in celebration of the dog. It actually got removed in 2011 by a brigade as part of some sort of protest. I didn't have the time to dig into this, but the way that the article I read frames it as though the protest, the gesture of protest here was specifically that they don't think this dog

really existed, so they took the statue and they threw it off the thing. Which is, which is, that can't be all of it, surely. That's, there's like 73 people detained over this. That can't be right. When asked to comment on the issue, there was a member of the Sambhaji Brigade, which is the brigade of people who were accused

of doing this, a guy named Purushottam Kedekar. He was asked to comment on the issue and he replied, I am away and out of normal range, may call you later, sorry. Okay. So, and that's what they went to press with. Yeah. I've been there too.

Deadlines are looming. You just gotta get some, some out there. Just throw it in there. The editor said I needed a quote, this is a quote. There is a monument in the Russian city of Togliatti called Loyalty to a German shepherd that was known as, just like a stray who would bark at the road, always at the same place, barking at passing cars.

Turns out that he was riding in a car where both of his humans had been in there with him and had crashed and died. He survived back at the spot where the car happened. The car crash happened. And so he gets sort of adopted by everyone but much in the same. He has a few different names. They call him like Kostya, Faithful. he is cared for by the locals but again escapes any attempt at shelter because he's so driven to come back to this place and find his people. Yeah, bark into the void. Been there.

Until he- oh bitch have I ever. He died in 2002 after seven years of that action. So Josie I heard you wanted to go to Scotland. I do! In 1850, a night watchman for the Edinburgh Police, a wee lad named John Grey, he adopts a wee Sky Terrier named Bobby to keep him company when he's trudging those long, cold, lonely... I'm losing it, I've got to stop.

Long, cold, lonely beats. He's trudging them long cold lonely beats. I'm losing it, I've got to stop. Long cold lonely beats. He's trudging them. Oh gosh. Bobby! Bobby. So I got some bad news for John years later. Diberculosis. I'm just saying there does seem to be a connection between dogs and death.

That's true. These dogs are harbingers. Yeah. And then they stick around to make sure they finish the job. Make sure you don't come back from that university. John dies February 15th, 1858. He is laid to rest in Greyfriar's Kirkyard. Didn't know the word Kirkyard. The story goes that Wee Bobby, he refused to leave John's grave even under the most adverse conditions so much that the keeper of the graveyard ended up building a wee

shelter for him to keep the the wee raindrops off his wee little heed. His legends spread as these things do and I should circle back there always imagine to like for maximum effect whether it's Hachiko or Grey Friars Bobby or any of these dogs you have to imagine them like, the worst weather, snow, they don't care. They're that lawyer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. None of the shopkeepers are in,

all the shutters are closed. One old woman on a bike comes by to check on him and be like, you should come with me, but he won't go. Well, the montage just like, the cherry blossoms are raining down this beautiful sunny day but also it's snow, also torrential winds are rained. Seasons are changing. Yes, yes.

Many, many seasons changing. Years are going by. Seven years later. Seven. Seven years later. Yeah, exactly. And Hachiko Monogatari very heavy on the cherry blossoms, very heavy on the snow, those sort of classical Japanese images, you know?

Beautiful stuff, good stuff. So we got Bobby, Grey Friar's Bobby's, waiting by this grave. And his little graveyard doghouse! That's pretty cute, too. And his little graveyard doghouse. That's very cute. That's very cute. Heartwarming. Comfortable. Hopefully.

And the bylaw gets passed in 1867 that requires all dogs to be licensed. Sir William Chambers, the Lord Provost of Edinburgh, a position I know all about, he paid for it personally and he gave the dog a collar with the inscription Grey Friars Bobby from the Lord Provost 1867 license. So he's like a fancy dog. Yeah, yeah. While he was cared for by the people of Edinburgh He continued guarding John's grave until his own death in 1872 A granite fountain was placed by the RSPCA with a little boby on top There we go, and I'd always take for granted that these dogs have a statue somewhere Usually multiples like Hachiko has like other ones of like the professor greeting Hachiko Oh, okay, okay. Yeah

Here's here's a cubist Hachiko. Here's Hachiko. Oh, okay, okay. Here's a different Hachiko. Yeah. Here's a Cubist Hachiko. Here's Hachiko on ice. You know what I mean? Right, right, right. Yeah, yeah. Hachiko at the beach. Hachiko, yeah. Yeah. Snowboarding, yeah.

Okay. Hachiko, a little sexy. It's true. And from one Bobby to another, how about I tell you the story of Bobby the Wonder Dog. This is Bobby with an I E at the end, although it is a boy. Oh, okay. Okay.

Okay. Thank you. All of these are boy dogs. Interesting. They are all boy dogs. They are all 201 boy dogs. That's called the barketry. Do you know what I would call that?

These bitches ain't loyal. These bitches got better things to do. No offense. Well that was dead. This Bobby's originally from Silverton, Oregon. We've made it, we've made it stateside. Wow. Yeah.

Yeah. That really was kind of traveling around the world, huh? So in 1923, Bobby's owners, the Brazier family are visiting family in Wolcott, Indiana. When Bobby, a Scotch-Colley mix gets chased off by some other dogs, just some stray dogs, giving Bobby the business, runs off. An exhaustive search falls from there. Nobody can find Bobby heartbroken.

We return to Silverton, Oregon. Oh, is this a homeward bound situation? Oh, absolutely it is. Yeah. Even better, the humans don't die in this one too. That's like a nice thing. No tragic deaths of really of any kind in this one. Mrs. Brazier's daughter from a previous marriage

actually happens to be walking out and sees Bobby and is like, holy shit, is that fucking Bobby? Yeah. Because Bobby looks like hell. He's mangy. His toenails are gone. He shows every sign of having walked 2,551 miles or 4,105 kilometers. Ripley's Believe It or Not covers the story. It spreads and because it spreads we get reports from people who had fed and sheltered Bobby along the way. The Humane Society of Portland is able to retrace the route that Bobby had traveled through the various cities from

his many admirers and it basically follows the route that the humans took home. Go to this stop, fan out from here, Go to this stop. He was following the scent. It's very intuitive. Yeah, of course. What did you think he was doing? He had MapQuest up? Come on, Bobby. So sweet. So Bobby basically becomes a famous celebrity dog from there with bejeweled harnesses and keys to various cities being sent in abundance. He played himself in a 1924 film, The Call of the West. Bobby the Wonder Dog as himself.

Yes, yes. And he died in 1927, whereupon fellow canine film star Rin Tintin put a wreath on his grave. Wow. There have been fictionalizations, artistic representations, riffs on interpretations of all of the above. Yeah.

One of the most well-known, I think probably to our generation, is the episode of Futurama where Fry's dog waits for him to like un-cryogenically freeze forever. And they have this beautifully, this beautifully like heart wrenching and time lapse of him waiting. And again, we got the seasons, we got the snow, they knew what they were doing. And it's set to the song, I Will Wait For You from the Umbrellas of Sherbrooke,

which is like a devastating song in its original context and somehow even more relentlessly sad in this one. You can also see the Hachiko statue itself treated in fiction. You get like, I was just started playing a game, which is kind of what gave me the idea to do this story. I was playing a game called 428 Shibuya Scramble, where the opening set piece is a stakeout

at the Shibuya Scramble, where the money handoff is happening at the Hachiko statue. Like that's where we start our action in the game. Cuuute! Yeah, yeah. Yeah, this, um, geographic fixture. Yeah. And so we've got different treatments of the Hachiko story itself in Telugu, in Chinese. I watched Hachiko Monogatari, which was the Japanese one made in 1987, directed by Seijiro Koyama. Good, slow, a high mellow drama. Again, it's the only way really to tell this story.

Yeah. But the doggy actors were very, very cute in both Hachiko Monogatari and 2009's Hachi, a Dog's Tale, directed by Lassie Hallstrom. The American one now. Josie. What if we were to take this story? Okay. This doesn't, I'm sure you agree, this doesn't need to happen in Japan, right? Uh, I mean, obviously it can happen in all these different locations in the world.

Yeah, yeah. But I mean specifically the story of an Akita named Hachiko. Oh. That doesn't need to happen in Japan. Well... Shibuya Station, all of it. No, we can just get, it's not important. It's window dressing.

What if, what if we cast- You're speaking American now, I hear ya. Yeah, I sure am, I surely am. Yeehaw! Not that kind of American actually. Let's put this story in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, okay Move this over to New England. Okay, you know the very manalo. Let's go and

Not to say that it couldn't be a Japanese character, but what if we got like a rumpled white guy to play like a professor Tweety it should be someone who kind of vaguely likes Eastern things and is like maybe like a white guy with like some Eastern mystic vibes to him. It can only be Richard Gere. Oh my god, you're right. It can only be Richard Gere who plays this professor. Richard goddamn Gere.

Richard Gere, we've got Joan Allen putting in an absolute nothing performance as the wife collecting a paycheck. Good, good, good for her. If you had to cast like a spry, roly-poly train station guy with a twinkle in his eye to act off the dog after Richard Gear bites it, who do you pick? Danny DeVito? We were looking for Jason Alexander. Ah, fresh from under his desk on Seinfeld. Okay, yeah. Yes, just crawled out to go say hi to Hachiko and we've also got,

genuinely one of my faves. Do you know Kari Hiroyuki Tagawa? No. Generationally, if you needed like an evil Japanese guy for a movie, you got Karihira Yugi Togawa. Most notably, he played Shang Tsung in the Mortal Kombat movie, where he had the immortal line, your brother's soul is mine! Which I always text to my brother because it's technically true. But he's here as like Richard Gere's Japanese friend and like there are gestures made in this film towards honoring like the original Japanese made in this film towards honoring like the original Japanese context of this story in like very odd ways and this is one

of them. God. Is that like Richard Gere has this Japanese friend at the university who he like does like kendo with like they do like bamboo swords together. Yeah. Richard Gere, like tea ceremony I think maybe they do at some point. Oh no. And he's the one who explains like you know ha. Oh no. And he's the one who explains like, you know,

hachi means eight in like, he's the one who kind of imparts that information, that part of it. Which at that point, why not just make it a golden retriever called Ralph? You're doing like a lot of gymnastics. Yeah, there's a lot happening. Yeah, yeah. The dog is cute. Every time I look at the- every time they play the dog, I'm really happy to see the dog. They got really good dog actors again. And then every time it cuts back to Richard Gere, I'm like, this is silly.

Like, what are we doing? Why is Richard Gere, what is, this is, Richard Gere has never crossed the Shibuya Scramble. What's going on? Like, what are we doing? This is fanfic. This is Hachiko fanfic. The other big change that they made that I don't agree with

in this version of it, he's a piano professor, he's like a music professor. And I think this is done entirely to like enable the most intrusive piano soundtrack you've ever heard in your life. It is constant. That makes sense. It is modeling. It is like watching a, you know those YouTube videos where someone has like taken a photo

of themselves every day for 15 years and then they speed it up and then they put This music behind it. Yeah, okay so the legacy of Hachiko, Nippon cultural broadcasting in Japan They lifted a recording of Hachiko barking from an old 78 rpm record that had been smashed into several pieces They were able to like melt it back together with lasers. Oh, wow! This is hot because this has Hachiko's bark on it. This is very high priority shit.

Yeah, yeah. They debuted the recording on May 28th, 1994 to millions of listeners. Yeah, I bet. Yeah. Here's the recording they lifted. Warning, he sounds a little sad. Yeah, here's the recording they lifted warning. He sounds a little sad In 2007 the statue was the subject of an April Fool's joke where the Japan Times which is the oldest English language newspaper in Japan Ran a front page story claiming that the Hachiko statue had been stolen Which is a fun thing to imagine because like

stolen. Which is a fun thing to imagine because like remember what we said about the Shibuya scramble even at like 3am there are people scramble crossing here like this thing is crazy the amount of people it turns over so like very Carmen San Diego when you think about the logistics of pulling off the Hachiko heist right? You're like hmmm I wonder if I could do that. I could I maybe my that'll be my last project before I retire. Yeah, okay. Hachiko himself obviously seen as emblematic of Shibuya station in addition to the statue. There are like murals, illustrations.

There's a Hachiko mini bus that can shuttle you to and from the station with its own special Hachiko theme song. I can't believe I missed all this. It was right there. You just had to go, that you just got bundled in the wrong direction. Yeah, you're right.

You just had to go the other way and you would have seen Hachiko. So what do you think this story and the resonance of stories like it, Hachiko, Fido, Bobby the Wonder Dog, what do these say about us and about dogs, do you think? May I make an offer? There's something very one-to-one

about how the people identify with the dogs in this story. Like you almost don't have a care for Professor Ueno. You might feel bad for the wife who kind of gets discriminated against in his wake. But other than that, you empathize with the dog, right? And you imagine what it must be like for the dog and in that dog we see something like the best of ourselves, patient, steadfast, devoted, whatever it is, especially if that's something that's highly valued in your culture. I think we can relate to what we perceive to be the dog's endless mourning because we mourn endlessly,

although we don't know if what Hachiko felt was grief. I think there's something in the way that the the bond between these two people, one of whom is a dog, these two beings, these two beings made them both immortal in that in waiting for Professor Ueno even long after he'd passed, Hachiko kept Professor Ueno alive in some way. Oh, yeah. And in memorializing Hachiko now that he's gone, we in some way keep them both alive. Mm-hmm. And I think the fact that neither of them really knew the circumstances of their fame before dying, makes it pure in its motivation in a really touching way.

And isn't that a moving thing to come from something as simple as like a man who really loved a puppy, right? Yeah, yeah, that's true. And the puppy who obviously loved him back. Yeah. Yeah. I think maybe another layer too is that it becomes like, a way to understand these animals. Like I'm thinking of the way that Hakuchi Ko was kind of originally like, you know, water thrown on him and like mustaches drawn on him. And then all of a sudden, he had this story and it could be this like personification, this anthropomorphization of an animal, like putting it into a human

context. But at least there's something that like makes some way to understand an animal so that you care more about them, which I think kind of says something horrible about humans that we can't just take an animal for their existence and what they experience. We have to kind of put it in a human context. But there's still something very sweet about that. Like, that dogs can love like that. Like if they're capable of that loyalty and love, then so are we. Why don't I end with some of the relevant humans

expressing their thoughts on what Hachiko means? Oh, okay. In the words of Takeshi Okamoto, and so this is someone who was daily going in and out of Shibuya station when he was a high school student. So he saw Hachiko every day. And in 1982, he said, Hachiko taught us the value of keeping faith in someone. Yeah. Says Saito Hirokichi. And so this guy you might recognize as the person who like brought media attention to Hachiko.

He was himself like an Akita preservationist and like very devoted to dog breeds in general, which is maybe why this like caught such a, rung such a chord for him. He said, if we interpret the account of Hachi waiting at Shibuya station until death in human terms, it becomes a moving tale of honorable service, but I don't believe that we can attribute such a sense of obligation to Hachi. He simply

had pure affection for the master, who had treated him so fondly. Not only Hachi, but all dogs are like this. It is unconditional and absolute love." Yeah. And, says Aetsu Sakuraba, who wrote that children's book Hachi, even 100 years from now, this unconditional devoted love will remain unchanged and the story of Hachiko will live on forever. Josie, would Batman do it? One of the things that I love about Batman is that he loves people so much. Like, it's some random stranger. Yeah, he's a people.

He's a people guy. And some random person comes up and is like, Oh, your dog and B man is just like, I love you. You're the best. One time Batman got out and I got a phone call on my cell phone. I didn't recognize it. And this woman was like, hi, I have your dog, Batman. I just opened my door and your dog jumped in my car. So I have him. I don't know where. Perfect. Yeah. You're not his one true love is what you're saying.

I have no doubt that he loves me, but I think he loves the world. But he has a full heart for many. Yeah. There's love only multiplies. Yes. What is love for but to share? Yes, exactly.

Got it, got it. And so in the event that I die and Beeman has to wait for me, I think he might get distracted. Yeah. That's fair. He'll give it a good try. He'll give it a good start,

like a good first hour and a half. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for listening. If you want more infamy, we've got plenty more episodes at bittersweetinfamy.com or

wherever you listen to podcasts. If you want to support the podcast, shoot us a few bucks via our Ko-fi account at ko-fi.com forward slash bittersweetinthemy. But no pressure, bittersweetinthemy is free, baby. You can always support us by liking, rating, subscribing. Leaving a review, following us on Instagram at bittersweetinthemy. Or just pass the podcast along to a friend

who you think would dig it. Stay sweet. The sources that I used for this infamous included the article from Texas Monthly Apocalypse Sound. Can Anything Stop the Feral Hog Invasion by Lauren Barson published May 2023. I looked at the website for the As Foundation. And I looked at a gastro-obscura article entitled Saving the Hogs of Aseba Island by Diana Hubbell, published January 10th, 2023. My sources for this episode included

Hachiko, the world's most loyal dog, Turns 100 by Nicholas Young for the BBC, July 1st, 2023. Hachiko, the faithful dog on Nipp for the BBC, July 1st, 2023. Hachiko, The Faithful Dog on Nipon.com, September 1st, 2023. I read the information about Hachi on the website Vicky Wong and Hachi, which is by Vicky Shigekuni Wong, who is one of the producers of the American Hachi, a Dog's Tale movie. I read the Akita Dog read information from the American Kennel Club. I read the Oregon Encyclopedia article on Bobby the Wonder Dog. I read Bobby the Wonder Dog's 2500 Mile Odyssey, Put Silver Tone on the Map by Finn J.D. John for Offbeat Oregon, January 2, 2011. I read Italy colon

Fido for Time Magazine, April 1, 1957. I read Fido, the 1940s Italian street dog who became famous for his loyalty to his dead master, Fido, waited 14 years at a bus station for him to come back by Goran Blasecki October 2nd, 2016 for the Vintage News. I read a DNA India article, 73 held, for removing Shivaji Dog statue from Raigad Fort on August 3rd, 2012. I read the story of Greyfire's Bobby by Ben Johnson for Historic UK. I read the Wikipedia articles for Shibuya Crossing, Loyalty Monument, and Wagya.

And I watched the films Hachiko, Monogatari, 1987, and Hachiko, A Dog's Tale, 2009. The clip of Hachiko's bark came from Nippon Cultural Broadcasting. You can find it on YouTube courtesy of GoDeckDominic. Bittersweet Infamy is a proud member of the 604 Podcast Network. Huge thank you to Jonathan, Erica Jo, Lizzie Dee, Dylan, and Satchel. All for their monthly support. The crew is growing, but you can still join. Go over to coffee.com, k-o-f-i dot com slash bittersweetinfamy. Become a monthly subscriber. You get access to the Bittersweet Film Club,

or you can go and check out the Melty's Afterparty for free. Our interstitial music is by Mitchell Collins and the song you're currently listening to is Tea Street by Brian Steele. Go hug your dog.