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Publisher: PENGUIN BOOKS
Edition: 2008 Hardback, 237 pages
ISBN: 9781594201240
Item: B0143
Ships the next business day.
Summary: How one man's consuming passion for dogs saved the legendary Akita breed from extinction and led him to a difficult, more soulful way of life in the wilds of Japan's remote snow country.
After the Japanese surrender in 1945, there were only sixteen Akita dogs left in the country. The magnificent and fiercely loyal Japanese hunting dogs had been donated to help in the war effort, or had been eaten, their pelts used by the military to line the winter coats of soldiers.
At ninety-four years old, Morie still raises and trains the Akita dogs that have come to symbolize his life.
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Expanded Description:
After the Japanese surrender in 1945, there were only sixteen Akita dogs left in the country. The magnificent and fiercely loyal Japanese hunting dogs had been donated to help in the war effort, or had been eaten, their pelts used by the military to line the winter coats of soldiers. Morie became obsessed with preventing the extinction of the four-thousand-year-old breed.
How one man's consuming passion for dogs saved the legendary Akita breed from extinction and led him to a difficult, more soulful way of life in the wilds of Japan's remote snow country.
As Dog Man opens, Martha Sherrill brings us to a world that Americans know very little about-the snow country of Japan during World War II. In a mountain village, we meet Morie Sawataishi, a fierce individualist who has chosen to break the law by keeping an Akita dog hidden in a shed on his property.
During the war, the magnificent and intensely loyal Japanese hunting dogs are donated to help the war effort, eaten, or used to make fur vests for the military. Devoted to the dogs, Morie is forever changed. For the dogs, Morie passes up promotions, bigger houses, and prestigious engineering jobs in Tokyo. Instead, he raises a family with his young wife, Kitako-a sheltered urban sophisticate-in Japan's remote and forbidding snow country.
At ninety-four years old, Morie still raises and trains the Akita dogs that have come to symbolize his life.
In beautiful prose that is a joy to read, Martha Sherrill opens up the world of the Dog Man and his wife, providing a profound look at what it is to be an individualist in a culture that reveres conformity-and what it means to live life in one's own way, while expertly revealing Japan and Japanese culture as we've never seen it before.
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