In 2010, two years after adopting the shiba inu, Sato posted an image on her weblog of Kabosu crossing her paws on the couch and giving the digicam a beguiling look.
That picture grew to become the “Doge” meme – and later an NFT digital art work that bought for US$4 million.
“She is pulling a weird face,” Sato laughs. “Now I think she looks really nice” within the well-known picture however “at first I thought it could be trashed”.
The meme grew from a web-based discussion board publish into an anarchic in-joke that bounced from school bedrooms to workplace emails.
“One of my friends messaged me: ‘Isn’t this picture Kabosu?’ Then I searched for it and found all sorts of memes, like Kabosu turning into a doughnut,” Sato says.
The 62-year-old is now so used to “unbelievable” occasions that when Tesla boss Musk modified the icon for Twitter, now X, to Kabosu’s face final 12 months, she “wasn’t even that surprised”.
“In the last few years I’ve been able to connect the online version of Kabosu, all these unexpected things seen from a distance, with our real lives.”
Kabosu spends most days resting in a cart on the kindergarten or on a giant cushion at home, the place fan-made Doge tributes adorn the partitions.
The memes sometimes use goofy damaged English to disclose the interior ideas of Kabosu and different shiba inu “doge” – normally pronounced like pizza “dough” however with a “j” on the finish.
“Very love. Such star OMG. So heart. Much drawing,” says one framed print utilizing this signature “doge speak”.
Kabosu fell ailing with leukaemia and liver illness on the finish of 2022, and Sato is bound the “invisible power” of prayers from followers worldwide helped her pull via.
Then, in November 2023, a US$100,000 statue of Kabosu and her couch crowdfunded by Own The Doge, a cryptocurrency organisation devoted to the meme, was unveiled in a park in Sakura.
Sato and Own The Doge have additionally donated giant sums to worldwide charities, together with greater than US$1 million to Save the Children. The NGO says it’s “the single largest cryptocurrency contribution” it has ever obtained.
“The Doge is the most popular dog of the modern era,” says Tridog, a pseudonymous member of Own The Doge, describing Kabosu as “the Mona Lisa of the internet”.
Dogecoin was began as a joke by two software program engineers and is now the world’s eighth most dear cryptocurrency, with a market cap of US$23 billion.
“The Doge meme was pretty big on the internet in 2013 and I spent a lot of time on Reddit and other forums back then,” says Dogecoin co-founder Billy Markus.
Markus, who’s not affiliated with Dogecoin, was amused by the “silliness and innocence” of the memes.
Fellow founder Jackson Palmer “drank a beer and saw the doge meme and bitcoin in the news and thought saying he was gonna invest in Dogecoin would make a funny tweet”, he mentioned.
Markus discovered the thought hilarious and created the coin in “a few hours” earlier than contacting Palmer and taking it reside.
“Lots of weird stuff happened after that,” he says.
Since then, Dogecoin has been backed by stoner hip-hop king Snoop Dogg, Shark Tank entrepreneur Mark Cuban and rock band Kiss’ bassist Gene Simmons, who as soon as tweeted: “I bought Dogecoin … six figures.”
But its most eager supporter might be the billionaire Musk, who jokes concerning the foreign money on X – sending its worth hovering – and hails it as “the people’s cryptocurrency”.
Dogecoin has additionally impressed a plethora of different low cost and extremely risky “meme coins”, together with spin-off Shiba Inu and others primarily based on dogs, cats or Donald Trump.
A solitary determine sporting a Doge masks seems to be out over the Los Angeles skyline – that is Tridog, who says he has “worked for a dog photograph for almost three years”.
Own The Doge is his full-time job, and he preaches its motto D.O.G.E, or “Do Only Good Everyday”.
In 2021, Sato bought the viral picture of Kabosu as a non-fungible token (NFT), a digital possession certificates that may be traded on-line, to a bunch of cryptocurrency artwork collectors referred to as PleasrDAO for US$4.2 million.
That makes it “a top-five most expensive photo ever sold”, Tridog says.
PleasrDAO cut up the NFT’s worth right into a brand-new meme coin referred to as $DOG, permitting many individuals to collectively “own” the meme.
Own The Doge has introduced followers and different meme stars to Japan to satisfy Kabosu and Sato, and it not too long ago secured the mental property rights to the well-known picture, paving the way in which to make Doge toys, movies and different merchandise.
As a rescue canine, Kabosu’s actual birthday is unknown, however Sato estimates her age at 18 – previous the typical lifespan for a shiba inu.
When Kabosu dies, “the world will mourn”, Tridog says, however “a legend always lives on”.
He hopes individuals will keep in mind “the deeper values” behind the Doge meme: “the wholesomeness, the silliness, the not taking yourself too seriously.”
