“Japan Comfort” in a doggy Doge world
The history of the Internet is memes, the history of memes is Japan -- and a certain Shiba Inu symbolizes it all.
This week, international media outlets were abuzz with reports of the passing of Kabosu, a Very Good Girl who went to that kennel in the sky on Sunday at the ripe old age of 18. That the death of a family’s pet would warrant global media coverage might surprise. But Kabosu was, and remains, a superstar of the Internet. Some are already hailing her as the Hachiko of the 21st century. And this particular Shiba Inu might also be called the fuzzy face of two big cultural shifts that happened over the course of her life: the insinuation of internet meme culture into virtually every sphere of the real world, from society to finance and politics; and Japan’s cultural appeal evolving from “cool factor” to “comfort.”
Kabosu is thought to have been born in 2006, but her celebrity dates to February of 2010, when her owner Atsuko Sato posted a series of snapshots on her blog, as pet owners do. (You can see the fateful post here.) There they sat, unremarked-upon, for another three years. But everything changed in July of 2013. That’s when someone took one of the photos from Sato’s set, featuring Kabosu with paws crossed, giving the camera a quizzical side-eye, and merged it with an existing meme called “Doge.”
You can read about the history of Doge here, if you’re so inclined, but in a nutshell it involves adding fractured English captions in Comic Sans typeface to photos of dogs doing cute things. Depending on who you ask, Doge is pronounced variously like “dog,” “dohj” or rhyming with “vogue.” Much confuse! Whatever the case, the linking of Kabosu and Doge turbocharged both. Quickly her face became that of the meme’s.
Then came an even more unexpected development: in December of that year, a pair of tech-pranksters launched Dogecoin, a parody of Bitcoin, crossing the streams with yet another online fad for cryptocurrencies. Kabosu wasn’t the only dog featured in the Doge meme, but she was certainly the most popular – an NFT (cue the crossing of another meme-stream) of the original photo sold for four million dollars at the peak of the craze for crypto-collectibles in 2021. Today, Dogecoin is best known for its promotion by Elon Musk. He briefly replaced Twitter’s bird logo with Kabosu’s face in an undoubtedly Ambien-fueled moment in 2023, then was slapped with a $258 billion lawsuit for “running a pyramid scheme to support the cryptocurrency.”
Such drama, for a little dog from Chiba prefecture! And all of it unfolding organically, grassroots, without any input from the dog’s actual owner. “I didn’t know anything” about it happening, she told NBC News, “and I still don’t really understand.” Still, she benefited handsomely from the publicity, sharing in the windfall from the sale of the NFT and other photos of Kabosu.
It isn’t particularly shocking that a picture of a cute animal might become a meme. From the Hampster Dance of 1999 to the Lolcats of the Aughts, they’ve been a staple of web culture almost as long as there has been a web. But there’s another, even bigger reason a Shiba Inu might become an online superstar: Japan, or more precisely things borrowed from Japan, have been inflecting meme culture from the very beginning.
Why should this be? Japan didn’t invent the Internet, or the web browser. It’s true that Japanese were pioneers of the mobile Internet in the late Nineties. But the technological limitations of the day also limited international interaction. Early Japanese feature-phones couldn’t display graphics very well, so users relied on text-heavy mobile-optimized websites curated by local providers. As a result Japanese netizens wouldn’t interact with their counterparts abroad in significant numbers until American social media giants began localizing their platforms, starting around 2010. And that was well over a decade beyond the debut of the earliest online meme: an animated GIF of a dancing baby, dating back to 1996.
Those who spent time in the proto-online world of the late Nineties will remember the inescapability of this little looping animation. It was embedded into screensavers and websites as a visual flourish, its crossovers into the mass media (including a primetime television appearance) a premonition of just how mainstream the web would become. But the baby doesn’t feel much like a modern meme. It wasn’t exactly shared, but rather copy-pasted; and more to the point it didn’t really say anything, literally or figuratively. Modern memes tend to take the form of Doge: an image, usually pilfered from someone else, overlaid with text to make some kind of point.
This point might be editorializing about some situation, or it might simply be a vibe. But swapping out the text on memes might be called the the dominant form of sharing tastes inside and outside of net cliques. And the style can be traced back to a singular moment from the turn of the Millennium: All Your Base.
“All your base are belong to us” is a mangled translation from a video game called Zero Wing. Initially developed for arcades in 1989, Zero Wing was later modified with a new intro movie and released on the Sega Mega Drive in Japan and Europe in 1991. Zero Wing the game pretty much came and went without a trace. But the opening movie would find a new life online, years later. Incidentally, this was an entirely unanticipated side-effect of something I touched on in my previous post: how little effort Japanese companies put into the translation of their games, in the Eighties and Nineties.
It isn’t known who “ripped” the movie and turned it into a looping GIF suitable for sharing online, but rip and post it they did. As word of the game’s hilariously fractured translation spread over the course of 1999 and 2000, netizens began photoshopping the climactically nonsensical catchphrase “all your base are belong to us” into all sorts of real-world photos.
In February of 2001, these were compiled into a music video that went even more viral than the photos had, catapulting the phrase across the increasingly thin boundary between life online and off. Pranksters posted signs with phrases from All Your Base in a small town in Michigan, leading to their arrest. Hackers managed to inject “all your base are belong to us” into the chyron of a local news station in North Carolina. Ars Technica has gone so far as to call the moment the video was posted “the moment the Internet as we know it really began.”
Then came 4chan. Better known today for spawning Anonymous, the Qanon conspiracy theory, the Gamergate harassment campaign, and the “alt-right” movement (no relation, I swear), 4chan began life in 2003 as a gathering place for teenage anime fans. The site mutated and metastasized greatly over the years, but it never lost touch with these formative roots. As 4chan emerged as the Internet’s premire troublemaker over the late Aughts and Teens, many of the memes it spawned retained a distinctive Japanese flavor, referencing Japanese pop happenings or directly incorporating Japanese words and imagery, in ways sometimes funny and sometimes frightening.
The prevalence of Japanese-inflected memes online, Kabosu and Doge included, is an interesting eddy in the broader currents of its soft power. None of these memes were made in Japan, nor do the vast majority specifically reference Japan. This means they don’t necessarily contribute to anyone’s opinion of the nation – a prerequisite for soft power.
Yet neither is their existence without meaning. Memes with Japanese content represent a visual index of the ubiquity of Japan’s influence, at least among those who spend a whole lot of time online. Japan used to be a very distant sort of presence for Westerners, both physically and conceptually. But now Japan isn’t exotic, or even particularly remarkable. With successive generations raised on Pokémon, Dragon Ball, Sailor Moon, and Nintendo games (among many others), the nation’s cultural products have come to possess a warm familiarity that is widely shared, making them easily incorporated into fantasies and identities, online and off. Kabosu’s birth and rise to fame coincided with the birth and rise of the Japanese government’s controversial “Cool Japan” initiative. But the way modern Westerners consume things from the country today is less Japan cool than it is Japan comfortable, as soft and enveloping as a well-worn anime T-shirt.
When you start looking, you can see this comfort factor everywhere, even beyond obvious examples, like “forest bathing,” or the obsession with Japan-themed self-help gurus like KonMari. You can see it in the way major brands like McDonalds hang entire global campaigns on anime-style imagery, or how OpenAI relies heavily upon Japanese names and imagery for their products, as I wrote about a few weeks back.
And you can see it in Kabosu, of course. That a cute puppy from Japan came to symbolize a meme wasn’t a coincidence. Given the deep interconnections between Japanese pop culture and online culture, it was practically inevitable. And really, can you think of any better face for meme culture than Kabosu? Much cute! Such influence! And most of all: good doge!
Thanks for yet another entertaining, thought-provoking piece! Small typo: a little dog from -Narita prefecture-?