Did you know that national monuments can have four legs, bright eyes, a waggy tail, and colorful fur?
Meet the Nihon Ken, Japan’s native dog breeds.
“Nihon-Ken” simply means “Japanese dog,” perhaps in the sense of symbolhood because these doggos go back a long way and are officially designated natural monuments.
The group has three categories: small, medium, and large. Very conveniently for us foreigners, it is bracketed — the small Nihon-Ken and the large one — by names that we might already know.
Shiba Inu (small)
Try getting this friendly with, say, the Lincoln Memorial and you’ll be looking at some serious jail time!
Not that Mr. Lincoln wasn’t a very good boy, but had you told him so and tried to pet him, he quite understandably would have picked you up and thrown you into the Potomac.
More information
- Association of Nihon Ken page
- National Shiba Club of America page
- The American Kennel Club’s facts about Shibas
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Hokkaido Ken (medium)
Dr. Wikipedia says that —
…The Hokkaido is believed to originate from the medium-sized dogs brought by immigrants from the main island of Honshu in the 1140s.[4][5] In 1869, the English zoologist Thomas W. Blakiston gave the breed the name “Hokkaido”. The breed was useful in the search for survivors of an Imperial Japanese Army regiment that was caught in heavy snow crossing the Hakkลda Mountains of Aomori Prefecture in 1902.
This hefty but lively dog isn’t well known outside of Japan, but it should be!
More information
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Kishu Ken (medium)
Okay, I’m trying to be serious here, but this video is documentary evidence that cats aren’t the only pet that chases its tail.
More information
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Kai Ken (medium)
“Ninja dogs”?
More information
- Why Kai Ken?
- Japanese Wikipedia page (autotranslated)
- Association of Nihon Ken page
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Shikoku Ken (medium)
This is the one that most closely resembles a wolf.
More information
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Akita Ken (large)
This internationally known Nihon Ken gets a Dogumentary —
— and, at least outside Japan, a controversy. She mentions it in the video, and per Wikipedia:
…The two separate varieties of Akita are a pure Japanese strain, called Akita Inu or Akita-ken, and a larger mixed strain, commonly referred to as the “American Akita”.[1] However, it is subject to debate as to whether the Akita strains are distinct, or if they constitute one breed…
Hmmm…it’s impossible to say which one we’re looking at in that video.
Using online translators, I noticed that, only for this Nihon Ken, a different set of characters was used in the Japanese Wikipedia page compared to the English-language version: ็ง็ฐ็ฌ
A search for that on YouTube presumably brings up videos of the Japanese Akita Ken — and it is SO cute!
More information
- Japanese Wikipedia page (autotranslated)
- Association of Nihon Ken page
- The American Kennel Club on Akita history
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Featured image: PardoY/Shutterstock
Flight To Wonder 