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171 5 a dog’s world the commodification of contemporary dog keeping In the spring of 1946, just over a half a year after the Japanese government’s surrender brought an end to the Second World War, the former army-dog specialist and owner of the Mikado Kennel, Sawabe Kenjiro ˉ, reopened his shop across the street from the Takashimaya department store in the downtown Tokyo neighborhood of Nihonbashi. The U.S. firebombing of 9 March 1945, which claimed approximately 120,000 lives and 23,000 homes, destroyed Sawabe’s shop and two wings of the Takashimaya store. Six months later, when the American occupiers arrived, they requisitioned what remained of the main Takashimaya building for office space. On resurrecting his shop, Sawabe changed its name from the Mikado, which had honored the emperor, to the Washington Dog Shop (Washinton inuten), an appellation that deferred to Japan’s new imperial rulers. The switch not only seemed like the neighborly thing to do, it proved to be a wise business decision, too, as many of Sawabe’s early customers were American soldiers and their families. The Sawabe family store conducted business at this location for the next six decades, although it was soon dwarfed by Takashimaya, which was returned by occupation authorities to its owners in the late 1940s and rebuilt in 1952. During the Mikado’s first decade in business, Sawabe catered to Tokyo’s wealthy citizens until wartime opportunities prompted him to focus on supplying the military with dogs. For the first few decades after the war, the Washington Dog Shop primarily served wealthy Japanese, who usually purchased Western dogs, and Americans and other foreigners, who often bought Japanese breeds. More recently, the extended Sawabe family expanded their business ventures beyond the well-placed shop, opening branches inside department stores, a veterinary office, and a pet hotel to sell puppies and an array of canine-related goods and services to a far greater number of dog keepers. The experience of the Sawabe family business highlights several of the principal trends of dog keeping in Japan since the end of the Second World War, trends it has shared with many countries, including the United States and western European nations, but also with many non-Western industrialized societies. These developments are at least threefold. First, thanks in large part to the powerful 172 Empire of Dogs influence of postwar American culture, the breeds and dog-keeping practices spread by nineteenth-century canine imperialism proliferated with increasing acceleration during the second half of the twentieth century. As a result, dogs and dog keeping exhibit a progressively more homogenous appearance throughout the world. Even when native dogs, such as the Japanese Akita, were able to achieve a degree of global recognition and acceptance, they were merely incorporated within a familiar configuration firmly established by earlier canine imperialism. Second, the middle class, rather than just the upper class, became the dominant hegemonic force in spreading cultural mores, including dog-keeping practices in the latter half of the twentieth century. In Japan, as elsewhere, possession of a purebred dog and treating the dog as a pet became a way for a growing number of people to affirm that they had achieved a middle-class level of economic prosperity and were living a modern, “cultured” lifestyle. In part because of this symbolic value, dog keeping spread rapidly as many more people became, in effect, not just keepers but consumers of canines. Third, dogs not only became pets, they were more than ever transformed into products, according to the often cruel logic of consumer capitalism. Ownership of a particular breed of dog at a certain time conferred social capital on owners and signified fashion and sophistication. In the last several decades in Japan, a country where many people think of themselves and just about everyone else as members of the middle class, there is less need to demonstrate that one belongs. Instead, people deploy dogs, as well as other products , to construct self or group identities, and to create new stratifications and distinctions that include and exclude other people within the imagined middle class. The dog is, of course, not the only animal endowed with symbolic meaning. Humans use numerous other animals to express identity. Dogs, though, are the most widely kept and the most visible. Indeed, in 2006 approximately 13 million dogs resided in nearly 20 percent of all households in Japan, and the numbers were even greater in the United States (around 39%) and the European...

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