Death and a Dog's Devotion Part II:
The Story of Japan's Most Faithful Dog
- AND -
The Little Yellow Dog on Planet Mars

Wednesday, July 4, 2001 - JAPAN (EARTH) and MARS

...Continued from Part I

TOKYO — Scotland's dogs may have taught us a lesson in loyalty and devotion, but a certain Japanese dog adds a bittersweet flavor of faith to the mix.  In 1923 a man and a puppy first came together and formed that superhuman bond that only animal-lovers will ever understand.

"Chu-ken Hachiko" (faithful dog Hachiko) was an Akita who came to Tokyo with his friend Professor Eisaburo Uyeno when the dog was a year old.  Each day "Hachi" would accompany Professor Uyeno as far as the Shibuya Train Station where they would say their fond adiosu before the train would carry the man to his work at the Imperial University.

It is uncertain whether Hachi would then return home for a few hours or remain fixed at the station, but in either case the dog would be waiting to greet his friend at the end of the day at that same spot with his tail wagging furiously.

On a morning in 1925 Professor Uyeno shared his ritual goodbyes with Hachi, stepped on the train and left for work.  He died that day before he could return home, and doubtlessly the little Akita was met with terrible disappointment in the form of an empty train.

Commuters then for the next ten years would report seeing little Hachi waiting patiently at the usual spot, often not leaving his post for days at a stretch.  

On March 8, 1935 he laid down to sleep at the assigned meeting-place and never woke up.

A bronze statue now marks the spot made famous by a faithful dog.  Writer Cheri Sicard reports from her last visit to Tokyo that she encountered there an old man who knew Hachi:

"He told me in broken English 'I knew him. I used to bring him treats. The station was much smaller then.' With that he approached the statue, gave it a friendly pat, wiped a tear from his eye and slowly walked away."

To this day the statue is a well-known landmark in the busy metropolis, often serving as a point of reference for people who tell each other, "Wait for me at the Hachi."

Somewhere on the distant, lifeless planet there stands a tiny robot, a six-wheeled, 24.3-pound (11 kg) mechanical dog who awaits the second half of a command issued so many years ago in a transmission from Earth.  Like a sentence broken in mid-speech, the transmission halted, or rather, fell on suddenly deaf ears, for an antenna glitch supposedly has rendered Rover unable to hear.

She merely waits patiently, politely for the commander to finish the thought, not knowing that the rejoinder will never come.  But in the absence of further instruction, the little mechanism carries out the only programming that it has ever known: await further word from base.

I imagine the little dog standing there with its gyros whirring and its solar circuits buzzing as it stands at attention before an impassable rock—though this rock is no more than six inches high—waiting for base to say which way to turn, left or right.  And as we step back from this tiny, yellow dog confronted by the six-inch rock, we see the strange dunes surrounding; we see the miles of silent terrain centered around this miniature show like an arena of bedazzled spectators watching, motionless and rapt, waiting to see which way the robot will turn; we see outside the arena, more silence, more stillness from the lifeless clouds and dust and stars; at some point we no longer see our tiny, yellow hero amid the galactica and millennia and emptiness of space, but we do see what a terrible, lonely place this universe can be for a dog without a friend.

If you have a dog, be sure to give him/her an extra pat on the head today.  If you don't, then why not rescue a dog and find out what devotion's all about?

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