Someone sent me an email asking about how I came to be where I'm at now, and if I had any advice for someone interested in getting involved with the Japanese breeds. I was inspired to write a blog post about it.
I got to this point in time through following my
passions. I'm the type of person who goes into fits at having to hunker
down for a 9-5, and I figure 'work' takes up the majority of a person's
life, so I'm going to choose mine carefully. I've found that letting my
desire to enjoy what I'm doing, coupled with hard work and a willingness
to take risks, has worked for me. I've had the opportunity to work with
celebrities, run massive music festivals, work for international
fashion brands, travel the world for free, direct film projects, do
running translation on the radio, TV, medical translation, and broker
huge international business contracts. And through all this I've met so
many amazing people. When people ask me what I do for a living, I'm
stumped. I do a lot of things. Really. And it would probably make your
head spin if I started listing everything.
Breeding and
exporting Nihon Ken was not something that I planned to do, and
definitely not as a business. It still is not a business for me, it's an
extension of who I am, and how I live my life. I've always tried to
live as ethically and sustainably as possible, and that lead me to try
out being a vegetarian for a while, but I had issues with that (another
long conversation). I figured if I was going to eat meat (and plant
matter too) I wanted it to be from an ethical, sustainable source. That
lead me to hunting. I've always loved dogs, and already owned some
terriers. Being in Japan I figured that the Japanese breeds were best
suited to the terrain here, and since I get really immersed in
everything I do, I started doing a lot of research and study on them.
This lead to me realizing that there was a lot of misinformation online
regarding the Japanese breeds, and in the interest of sharing what I was
experiencing and learning, I started blogging. I realized I was in a
special place being bilingual, and in Japan with direct access to all
the people and dogs that I would need to meet. Because there was no one
in my position, I knew I could make a big difference in the Nihon Ken
globally.
My focus has been to get correct information out
there. I put a lot of work into researching the things I say on my blog.
I've spent years, and a lot of finances to drive long distances to meet
people and see dogs. The amount of my life that I've poured into this
passion boggles my mind sometimes. Somewhere along the way I started
getting a lot of requests to help find dogs to send overseas. For the
first few years I turned most of them down, and would only send a few
dogs to friends. I always lost money on these projects. Finally one of
my breeder mentors told me that if I truly wanted to make a difference
in the prservation of the Japanese breeds here in Japan and overseas,
I'd need to do it in a sustainable manner. I was getting slowed down by
the fact that paying the bills would take precedence over my dogs,
hunting, and sending dogs overseas. I was managing some rather large
projects that would have me living out of hotels for months on end, away
from my dogs. You can see some big blank spots in my blogging. That's
what was going on.
I decided to make a change to be able to
live the lifestyle I really wanted, to be in the mountains in Japan
with my dogs. It took a few years of slogging it out in Tokyo to make it
a reality, but now I've been out here for a year and a half and it's
been terrific. I've been renovating an old cabin, building kennels,
working with my dogs, and exporting a lot of dogs. I still work on other
projects at times, but my life now revolves around my home and dogs. It
doesn't get boring, as I get to travel a lot when I ship dogs overseas,
and I've made some great friends all over the globe. My focus now is to
live more sustainably, to help preserve and better the Japanese breeds,
to improve the quality of the breeds overseas, and to learn and share
what I've learned with everyone.
My advice to anyone who is
really passionate about the Japanese breeds is to always keep an open
mind, be forever open to learning, meet as many people and dogs as you
can, have confidence in yourself and what you've learned, but be willing
to be proven wrong and move on. There is so much petty arguing and
rivalry in the dog world. I shake my head at it. Since my goals are
preservation and betterment, I'm not competing with everyone else, I'm
working with everyone else, preferably as many people as possible. If
you produce a better dog than I do (whether for show/hunting/pet), I'm
thrilled for you. I'll ask you how you did it, I will try harder to
pursue breeding the type of dog that I think should be passed on to the
next generation. If you beat me in show, I will applaud you because I
understand that there are all sorts of factors that go into a show win.
Maybe the judge has a preference, maybe I did not prepare myself or my
dogs properly, maybe the dog was not in peak condition. I'm not
competing against you. I'm competing against myself. I am pushing myself
to create dogs that I can be proud of. I will do everything in my power
to know that I did everything I could to raise a balanced beautiful
animal, and I will enjoy doing it. In the end, I want to share that
enjoyment with my friends. And of course, the more friends the merrier.
Life is better for me when I am drawing ever larger circles that draw
people and experiences in as opposed to smaller circles that keep
everyone out.
