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.

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...

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.

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.

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)