Tuesday, December 11, 2018

NIPPO Show Schedule Spring 2019

Here's the schedule for NIPPO shows in the Kanto (greater Tokyo) area.

March 3rd Tochigi Branch
March 10th Saitama Branch
March 17th Gunma Branch
March 24th Santama Branch (Western Tokyo)
March 31st Ibaragi Branch
April 7th Kanagawa Branch
April 14th Tokyo Branch
April 21st Yamanashi Branch (All Chubu Regional)
April 28th Chiba Branch (All Kanto Regional)

This is Kami-chan, a Bunta daughter born over at Yoshihide Sou, currently 4 months old.

Sunday, December 9, 2018

Read and Weep

So this just went up on NIPPO's website on the 6th of December.


https://www.nihonken-hozonkai.or.jp/news/%E4%BC%9A%E5%93%A1%E3%81%AE%E3%81%BF%E3%81%AA%E3%81%95%E3%81%BE%E3%81%B8%E3%81%8A%E9%A1%98%E3%81%84%E8%A1%A8%E6%98%8E%E6%9B%B8%E3%81%AE%E6%8F%90%E5%87%BA%E3%81%AB%E3%81%A4%E3%81%84%E3%81%A6/

So what I was saying might happen, has happened. If you don't sign the survey/pledge that I blogged about a bit ago, you won't be able to renew your NIPPO membership next year.

You can download the form by clicking on the above link (In the screengrab in this post I've underlined where to click on the page). I've listed how to sign it in this blog post http://nihonken.blogspot.com/2018/10/i-am-not-yakuza.html

Post the form to:
The Nihon Ken Hozonkai
1F Surugadai Sunrise Bldg
2-11-1 Kandasurugadai
Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo
Japan 101-0062

Tuesday, December 4, 2018

Chouseizakura Go

For everyone that is asking about the name etc of the male Shikoku that took 1st place in the adult male class at the NIPPO Grand National 2018, here's his pedigree. I'm still fleshing it out and collecting information, so it's not complete.
https://shikokuken.pedigreedatabaseonline.com/en/Chouseizakura-Go-%E6%9C%9D%E7%94%9F%E6%A1%9C%E5%8F%B7/pedigree/1147/i


Tuesday, November 20, 2018

Show Dogs and Stud Dogs

I want to scream this every time someone asks me for a puppy from champion parents. The NIPPO members producing the best dogs know this, the best show dog is not necessarily the best breeder.

Know the breed, know what you want to produce. There are no shortcuts. You will have to work to produce good dogs, and you have to look forward, often generations forward. 

Sunday, November 11, 2018

Saturday, November 10, 2018

I'm Offended

I had a comment on my last post about the survey/pledge NIPPO sent out and asked members to sign, stating that they are not (or are) members of an anti-societal group (the Yakuza essentially).
@Anonymous 
Frankly, that's stupid. Members are yakuza by default unless they proclaim otherwise, and membership may be blocked for those who do not expressly sign a pledge that they're not yakuza? Including foreign members? Nobody sees that as flawed? I'm offended, honestly.

For a minute there I thought Anonymous might have a point. But I took a minute and realized that no, it's not that stupid.

Firstly, you are not yakuza by default if you don't sign the paper and send it in. You are just deciding not to reply to a request from an organization that you are willingly a member of, that has rules it is free to set. If the organization changes its membership requirements, and you choose to ignore the new requirements, well it makes sense your membership would be in jeopardy. 

NIPPO is not just a breed club, it is a 公益財団法人 which roughly translated is a Public Interest Incorporated Association which gives it special tax exemptions and status. The requirements for receiving this classification are stringent, and it can be revoked. The Japanese breeds being classified as living national treasures also means the government and NIPPO have, and will continue to have, a very close relationship.

There have been issues in some (probably all) the Japanese breed clubs in the past at shows with threats of violence being made, judges threatened, rumors of attempted bribery, that sort of thing. I believe AKIHO had so many problems at one point that the government shut down their shows until they got their house in order.

The place of the Yakuza in Japan, it's history etc is fascinating, and they are many good books on the subject so I won't delve into anything serious here. All I will say is that the national government is continually moving toward the removal of the Yakuza's influence in all spheres of Japanese society. This move to clear any influence they may have out of NIPPO is not surprising.

To clarify here, NIPPO has not said that if you don't send the form in, that your membership cannot be renewed. That is just one thing I heard they might consider. At this point all that's happened is that since only around 60 percent (or something like that) of NIPPO members bothered to take the time to send the form back in, there will be no prime minister's award at this year's grand national.

If you're a NIPPO member and have grievances about something, there is a yearly meeting open to all members (or their proxies) to bring up topics of concern. For a while now I have been hoping that with the increase in overseas members and interest in the breeds overseas, that NIPPO would do more to publish important items and information in English.

Thursday, October 25, 2018

I Am Not Yakuza

All NIPPO members should have seen this piece of paper in the front of one of the last member's magazine's they received. Quite a few people asked me what they were supposed to do with it.
Essentially this is a pledge that states that you are not a member of, and are not affiliated with, an anti-societal group. In Japan, that's code for Yakuza. Yes, it may seem funny and unimportant to sign and send this in to NIPPO HQ. However this was one of the stipulations that the new chairman of NIPPO (the brother of the current prime minister) made when he accepted the chair. In Japan, removing the Yakuza from prominent positions in society is a big deal. All the Japanese breed clubs in Japan have probably had some issues with yakuza in the past.

The BIS prize at the NIPPO grand national is called the Prime Minister's Award, and is competed for by the dogs that have won best in breed (so the best Shiba, Kishu, and Shikoku go up against each other). The top dog receives the Souridaijinshou (Prime Minister's award), and the runners up receive the Monbukagakudaijinshou (Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology award).


The Japanese breeds are classified as national treasures, and that's not just a title. The government actually takes a role in guiding and as watchdog over the breed clubs, and these awards are official government awards. The Prime Minister's award has been awarded at the grand national since 1953, and the Minister of Education award has been given out even longer, since 1932.

Unfortunately, because not enough NIPPO members replied to this survey, this year there will be no Prime Minister's award given out at the national. So, I would request that if you are an overseas NIPPO member, do your part and fill out the form! Circle the spot I've circled in the below picture, and fill out the date/address/name/signature/membership number, and send that thing in to NIPPO HQ!


Saturday, October 13, 2018

Available Shikoku Female

EDIT 2018/10/22: THANKS FOR ALL THE INQUIRIES. THIS PUPPY HAS FOUND A HOME.

Due to a cancellation, this little tyke over on the right is available to a good home.
If you are interested, drop me a mail over at kato.the.walrus@gmail.com and I'll hook you up with her breeder.
She was born on the 18th of July, and her sire is my male, Bunta.
Here she is with her siblings...
Here she is at just under a month old...
This is her mother (pregnant)
And in the living room after giving birth.

Friday, October 5, 2018

UPDATE: NEW LOCATION FOR NIPPO GRAND NATIONAL 2018


The NIPPO Grand National 2018 has a new location in Hachioji City, Tokyo.
It is in the same general area as the last venue.
Here are the coordinates for the new venue

35°40'57.0"N 139°17'07.7"E

595-1 Kamiichibukatamachi, Hachioji, Tokyo, Japan


The dates are the same, November 17th (Shiba), November 18th (other breeds and BIS).

Friday, September 28, 2018

NIPPO Grand National 2018 Location is Changing!

There has been a problem with the venue that was scheduled to be used for the NIPPO Grand National in November, and the show cannot be held there.
NIPPO and the Santama branch are currently working on a solution. Once a new venue is announced, I will post it here on the blog.


Thursday, September 20, 2018

Kishu Ken Decline in the National Eye

National media has just sounded a warning about the declining numbers of Kishu in Japan. The Mainichi Shinbun reported on the issue on the 16th of September.
https://mainichi.jp/articles/20180916/k00/00e/040/207000c

Basically they're saying the same thing I blogged about back in February.
http://nihonken.blogspot.com/2018/02/kishu-registration-decline.html

Still no solutions though...

Tuesday, September 18, 2018

Lysosomal Storage Disease in the Shikoku

This is probably by far the most serious health issue I have seen in the Shikoku so far: lysosomal storage disease. I've posted about it here on the blog before, but now that I've got the database going, I'm going to start trying to track dogs that have been affected. The first affected dog I've added to the database is Koyuki
https://nihonken.pedigreedatabaseonline.com/en/Koyuki-Go-%E5%B0%8F%E9%9B%AA%E5%8F%B7-%E5%B8%B8%E9%99%B8%E7%9F%B3%E5%B7%9D%E8%8D%98/pedigree/111/i

She, like most Shikoku that are affected, started showing symptoms at around 6 months of age. It generally starts with head tremors, and then progresses to hindquarter weakness. Symptoms increase as time goes by, and most dogs die at between 3-5 years old. I've included a video that shows her in the mid to later stages of progression.


When Koyuki was finally euthanized, her body was donated to Nippon Veterinary and Life Science University for research, and lysosomal storage disease was confirmed.

Monday, September 17, 2018

What Have I Been Working On?

Yup, that database that I was just going to pop out, well it's turned out to be more time consuming than I thought. I'm currently manually entering dogs to the database, since a lot of checking and manual correction has to be made to the data. But, better than having no data!

For instance I've got 6 full generations of Gakuhou here https://shikokuken.pedigreedatabaseonline.com/en/Gakuhou-Go-%E5%B6%BD%E5%B3%B0%E5%8F%B7/pedigree/42/i

And for kicks, I've connected the dots all the way through to the father of the Choushun line https://shikokuken.pedigreedatabaseonline.com/en/%E9%95%B7%E6%98%A5%E5%8F%B7/pedigree/618/i

So here we are at the very beginning of the breed. I was pretty excited when I realized I had an unbroken line of data all the way to Choushun.

I've currently got just over 600 dogs entered. My short term goal is to get 10 generations of data entered for all my dogs, and my friend's dogs. I'm contemplating crowdfunding this, since it is costing me a fair bit to create and maintain this site, and it's now very time consuming to get all this data entered (plus all the phone calls to NIPPO to confirm information). But yeah, have some fun and take a look at some of the entries. Right now it's just barebones stuff, no health data or anything like that.

Special thanks to Mr.Ishihara of the NIPPO Chiba branch for collecting this mountain of over 90,000 Shikoku entries, over all these years!

And protip (and another reason this data entry is costing me): NIPPO will send you copies of pedigrees on request, 200JPY/dog.

Saturday, September 8, 2018

NIPPO Branch Shows Autumn 2018

The Autumn show season starts tomorrow in Tochigi. I'll probably start going from Ibaragi.

September 9th Tochigi Branch
September 16th Ibaragi Branch
September 23rd Santama Branch
September 30th Saitama Branch
October 7th Chiba Branch
October 14th Tokyo Branch
October 21st Gunma Branch

November 4th All Kanto Regional (Kanagawa Branch)


Saturday, August 11, 2018

Traits and Faults

安房山犬荘 Awa Mountain Dogさん(@awamountaindog)がシェアした投稿 -

This is a young female out of Chouhou (Nidai Iwahori Sou) and Kaori (Awa Yamainu Sou). She's on the small side, and has some marking issues (socks), but also has some lovely traits like her color and face. She's short in the torso as well.
It's tough trying to breed dogs to a high standard, but that's probably part of what keeps us going.



Friday, August 3, 2018

Sweaty Summer

 Judging from my Facebook feed, it looks like it's been an insanely hot summer just about everywhere. If it hasn't been that hot where you are, feel free to correct me. Over here, the heat and humidity have been off the charts. Literally record breaking. A week or two ago we had a typhoon come through, and for 2 or 3 days everything cooled down, but here we are today at 34 degrees and 92 percent humidity (and it's sunny!).

The dogs are making it through the summer, just barely. We humans are just trying to jump from aircon to aircon to beach. Anyway, since I haven't posted much this year, just working on getting back in the groove of blogging. I've got more about the Nihon Ken to say.

I don't think I put this picture up yet, but this is a Kai male I saw at the KKA national show in April. For the first time in a long time I saw a Kai I quite liked in type.

And just throwing these pics in here from a month or so ago. This is Koto, a female out of Bunta x Chacha (born here at my house). Hopefully she can be shown at the Grand National this year. Prep for that is already in full swing...



It sure ain't easy to produce the type of dogs you want, and it surely takes a lot of blood, sweat, and tears. I guess that's a large part of what keeps us going though.

Wednesday, August 1, 2018

The Little Prince

We've had Ken here at the house since he was a crazy mouthy drama queen of a 2 month old Shiba pup. Now he's quite a nice little 8 month old that does less of the naughty things. He's at around 39cm now at the withers, has all his teeth and testicles. Maybe we'll show him for fun haha. He was originally slated to go elsewhere, but here he is 6 months later. Just sharing the pics so everyone else can share in the maturation process (and so I have a record of it).







Dogumentary TV

I've known about Dogumentary TV since they interviewed my good friend Brad Anderson over at Yamabushi Kennel. I was just click clacking through Youtube today and watched some of their newest videos and really enjoyed the quality they are putting out there.

Just thought I'd put it up here on the blog and recommend Dogumentary TV for all the other dog lovers out there. Here's their channel link:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpejL4mTlUJ_hfQY1PiCW6Q


And for everyone wondering, the dogs and I are doing well. I just haven't felt like blogging much recently. Maybe that will change once we get through this scorcher of a summer!

Friday, June 8, 2018

The Grand Disconnect

I get to travel a lot, love it, but more and more I'm getting tired of the cities. The New York's, the Barcelona's, the Tokyo's, these massive temples to consumerism. I love the people, love the craziness, the art, but I hate the disconnect with anything natural. I just shake my head and wonder what everyone's doing, and if anyone really sees how broken a system of greed rewarded, consumption triggered, and dog eat dog worship is. I remember when we had the earthquake here in 2011, the cities started to run out of everything extremely quickly. Picture a city of millions running out of basic necessities like food due to an infrastructure breakdown.

I see this disconnect everywhere, and tonight I was reminded of it again as one of my friend's posted a link to this blog post with its ever so tantalizing click-baiting title.


https://medium.com/@drewfrench/grass-fed-beef-the-most-vegan-item-in-the-supermarket-8c46b45a0d47

But read it. I read it. While I'm sure there are things we can nitpick in the reasoning, I've been saying a lot of these things for a long time. The vast deserts we create when we cut everything down to plant a single type of plant, destroying the ecosystem, and then violently guarding it so no other animal can get in or feed... Let's just think about that. So while my answer is to eat wild game meat and not grass fed beef, I'm giving a big ol' thumbs up to this blog post. And here I am, finally blogging again.

Tuesday, March 20, 2018

Available Shikoku Male

EDIT: Thanks for all the mails. This guy has found a home.
#########################################

I think I posted one pic of this guy a while back.
He was born on December 27th, and is out of Bunta x Kaori (Kaori is a Kuromasa x Chacha pup). He's a friendly pup, with a very nice temperament. If anyone's interested, mail me at kato.the.walrus@gmail.com




Here's pics from when the litter was younger.






Monday, March 19, 2018

Another Shikoku Database

So we already have a beautiful user generated pedigree database for the Shikoku Ken over at www.shikoku-pedigree.com that was put together by Nico over at Kasatori Sou in the Netherlands. I have however wanted a database to track COI, AVK, health issues, that sort of thing. The current Shikoku Pedigree site is great for a quick look up of a dog, get some good info and pictures, or putting pedigree information up quickly. It's user friendly.

What I've been working on for a while is a separate database that simply put will be less user friendly. And less friendly to me as well. I'm going through my excel database in Japanese with 96,000 entries, weeding out the dogs with not enough information, or double entries etc and am going to try to make it useful to track the past and current Shikoku gene pool.


https://shikokuken.pedigreedatabaseonline.com/en/ is where the data will be. I've currently put a bit of test data in there to see how it all comes up and calculates, how it handles Japanese kanji and searches, and so far all is good. I like the functionality of seeing the COI/AVK calculations, and being able to search for common ancestors in the pedigrees of multiple dogs (say you're looking for some connection concerning a genetic health issue).



Anyway, not sure how soon it will be before I get all the data up, but I reckon if I blog about it it will happen sooner!

Thursday, March 15, 2018

NIPPO Grand National 2018

EDIT 2018/10/05: THE VENUE HAS CHANGED! Here is the link for the new venue
http://nihonken.blogspot.com/2018/10/update-new-location-for-nippo-grand.html

The NIPPO Grand National 2018 will take place in Ome city, Tokyo, on the Meisei University campus.
It will be hosted by the NIPPO Santama branch.
November 17th - Shiba judging
November 18th - Medium/Large breed judging and BIS

Here is the address and map:

 2 Chome-590 Nagabuchi, Oume-shi, Tōkyō-to 198-0052 https://goo.gl/maps/kEWNGnV6xHk



I look forward to seeing you all there. It should be a good national to attend for people overseas seeing as the venue is close to the Tokyo metropolitan area.

Saturday, March 3, 2018

Two Shikoku Females Available

EDIT 2018/03/15 Both of these girls have been homed. Thanks for all the mails!

So these two lovely little Shikoku females are available.
Date of birth: 2017 December 21st
If anyone's interested, give me a holler at kato.the.walrus@gmail.com
They're Mikasa Sou lines on one side, and Yano lines on the other.

Tuesday, February 27, 2018

Kishu Registration Decline

Sounds like I'm beating an ever dying drum here, but by the numbers the Kishu decline is now worse than the Shikoku's. The numbers were there in my last post about the Hokkaido, but I thought I'd put them here too just so everyone's aware.

January of 2011  Kishu 700-900

NIPPO registrations in 2017
Kishu: 372 (JKC 2 probably exports, not pups)

So we've basically lost 50 percent of Kishu registrations in 6 years. In comparison, the Shikoku we've managed to keep the decline to a more manageable number, and I think there's a lot of awareness about the low numbers.


We're basically seeing extremely dangerous decline in registration numbers for all the medium size Japanese breeds other than the Kai. I'm thinking I'm going to turn my new Awa Yamainu blog into a mostly Japanese blog and see if I can bang up some interest here in Japan.

I'm thinking I'll breed Baron's daughter Karen on her next heat to do my part.

Tuesday, February 13, 2018

NIPPO DUES, KKA DUES

Hey everyone, it's that time of year. Time to pay your NIPPO/KKA/AKIHO membership fees. Since so many people ask me to pay for them, I've decided this year I'm going to do it in one shot in order to save me time.

Just send you renewal fee to my PayPal at kato.the.walrus@gmail.com and include your name and membership number (if you know it), and which club the fees are for, and I will pay in bulk around March 1st. So please, send the fees before the end of February. If you're unsure what the membership fee is, just drop me an email and ask.

Cheers everyone, and Happy New Year!

Friday, February 9, 2018

Kai Puppies

EDIT: 2018/02/22 All three Kai females have been homed. Thanks for all the mails.

There are 3 female Kai pups available at the moment. Contact me for details at kato.the.walrus@gmail.com They were born over at a friend's kennel, and were sired by a male I like, Asahi. He's got a great temperament which seems to carry through to his pups. The pups are around 50 days old at the moment.
Unfortunately there were some last minute reservation cancellations which made these pups available.