Japanese dog of 'Doge' meme fame dies
TOKYO: The Japanese dog whose photo inspired a generation of oddball online jokes and the US$23 billion Dogecoin cryptocurrency beloved by Elon Musk died on Friday (May 24), its owner said.
"She quietly passed away as if asleep while I caressed her," Atsuko Sato wrote on her blog, thanking the fans of her shiba inu called Kabosu - the face of the "Doge" meme.
"I think Kabo-chan was the happiest dog in the world. And I was the happiest owner," Sato wrote.
As a rescue dog, Kabosu's real birthday was unknown, but Sato estimated its age at 18, past the average lifespan for a shiba inu, with its birthday celebrated in November.
In 2010, two years after adopting Kabosu from a puppy mill where it would otherwise have been put down, Sato took a picture of her pet crossing its paws on the sofa.
She posted that image - with the fluffy shiba inu giving the camera a beguiling look - on her blog, from where it spread to online forum Reddit and became a meme that bounced from college bedrooms to office e-mail chains.
The memes typically used goofy broken English to reveal the inner thoughts of Kabosu and other shiba inu "doge" - pronounced like pizza "dough" but with a "j" at the end.
The picture also later became an NFT digital artwork that sold for US$4 million and inspired Dogecoin, which was started as a joke by two software engineers and is now the eighth-most valuable cryptocurrency with a market capitalisation of US$23 billion.
Dogecoin has been backed by hip-hop star Snoop Dogg, Shark Tank entrepreneur Mark Cuban and Kiss bassist Gene Simmons.
But its most keen supporter is probably the billionaire Musk, who jokes about the currency on X - sending its value soaring - and hails it as "the people's crypto".
Dogecoin has also inspired a