This was an editorial in the North County Times, CA.
Coyote Speaks
By Robert Kahn
This is a war story about a dog. It has a rather long introduction.
People like dogs because they are loyal, but the Akita makes people loyal to them.
In the two years I have been walking my Akita around town, perhaps a dozen people have come up to me to tell me about their Akitas. Every single one said a variation of, “The best dog I ever had.” Most of them said, “I wouldn’t have any other dog but an Akita.”
Akitas are something like a wide German shepherd, but furrier, stronger, with a massive chest, rippling shoulder muscles, a big square head and a fluffy tail they carry curled up over their butt. They are smart, calm and protective and they have -- I don’t know how else to say this -- a catlike independence. They can take people or leave them, and they let you know it.
I got an Akita because my fiancée had one and it was the best dog I ever knew. My fiancée got a better offer and when she left me I missed her dog.
Rufus has the same traits Nikki did. They don’t beg, they don’t whine, they don’t bark for no reason. If a stranger approaches the house, they will bark one time. Once is enough. An Akita’s bark sounds like the rumbling of an ancient volcano. It’s the sort of bark that makes you stop where you are and then back up slowly until you are on the other side of town.
Without any training at all, Nikki would check the perimeter of the yard to begin every walk. If anyone or any dog had trespassed, she would look very concerned.
Nikki would not chase a ball or a stick to save her life. Rufus will chase a ball two or three times, but after that, he will give me a look as though to say, “Does this amuse you?” then he will saunter over the ball and lie down with it -- probably to keep it away from me.
The Akita was bred in Japan to hunt bears and it is the only dog I know of that has been declared a national monument. Now, a dog breed does not exist except in the dogs themselves, which means the Akita is the only Platonic form that is a national monument.
There is a statue of an Akita at a subway station in Tokyo to memorialize a dog who followed its master to the train station every morning and waited there for him to come home. One day the master died at work, and the Akita waited there for years, until it died waiting. Other people brought it food and water, then put up a stature for it.
This brings us to our war story. One afternoon not long ago I was walking Rufus and an old woman came out of a store down the block. The woman looked like she was pushing eighty, and pushing it wherever she wanted it to go. She had the look of a woman who was used to issuing orders and to being obeyed. When Death comes for her in twenty or thirty years, I am sure she will tell him to take a seat, wait his turn and mind his manners.
She stopped in front of Rufus. “That’s a beautiful Akita,” she said.
“Thank you,” I said.
Then she told me about her Akita. She was a nurse in Gen. MacArthur’s occupation force in Japan just after World War II. She was stationed on the outskirts of Nagasaki, taking care of a camp of women and children who had no place to live because their city had been incinerated by an atomic bomb.
“MacArthur issued orders that Akitas were to be shot on sight,” she said. “Not because they were dangerous, but because they were a national symbol.”
She heard that one woman in the camp was sneaking out at night, sometimes sneaking out two times a day, to venture into the rubble. She thought the woman might be hiding a man there, perhaps feeding him from the camp’s food supplies. The woman could have been shot for leaving the camp. So the nurse decided to follow her one night.
The Japanese woman walked down a ruined block and removed a board that was covering the entrance to a basement, or perhaps just a hole in the ground, and she disappeared into it. When she emerged a few minutes later, the nurse asked her what was down there. The woman wouldn’t tell her, so the nurse went to look. She removed the board, and there in the hole was a mother Akita and two puppies. The Japanese woman had been risking getting shot to feed the Akitas.
Well, this nurse must have been pretty tough even when she was young, because she countermanded Gen. MacArthur’s orders and made sure the mother Akita was fed. She adopted one of the puppies and brought it home to the States and she’s had Akitas ever since.
“I wouldn’t have any dog but an Akita,” she said.
Robert Kahn is a North County Times staff writer.
I wouldn't be without an Akita, either!
. Marc got that job, too.....I hope we are done with Mother Nature for a while now!
. It was hot as hell and oppressively humid this weekend, so she worked hard for this! Here is the happy winner 
