TOKYO – The Japanese dog whose photo inspired a generation of oddball online jokes and the US$23 billion (S$31 billion) Dogecoin cryptocurrency beloved by eccentric billionaire Elon Musk died on May 24, her owner said.
“She quietly passed away as if asleep while I caressed her,” Ms 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,” she wrote.
As a rescue dog, Kabosu’s real birthday was unknown, but Ms Sato estimated her age to be 18, past the average lifespan for a shiba inu, with her birthday celebrated in November.
In 2010, two years after adopting Kabosu from a puppy mill where she would otherwise have been put down, Ms Sato took a picture of her pet crossing her 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” – a word stemming from the misspelled “dog”, and pronounced like pizza “dough” but with a “j” at the end.
The picture also later became a non-fungible token 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.
‘Unbelievable’ events
Dogecoin has been backed by hip-hop star Snoop Dogg, Shark Tank entrepreneur Mark Cuban and Kiss bassist Gene Simmons.
But its keenest supporter is probably Mr 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 plethora of other cheap and highly volatile memecoins, including spin-off Shiba Inu and others based on dogs, cats or Donald Trump.
Kabosu fell ill with leukaemia and liver disease in late 2022, and Ms Sato said in a recent interview with Agence France-Presse at her home in Sakura City, in Chiba prefecture east of Tokyo, that the “invisible power” of prayers from fans worldwide helped her pull through.
Ms Sato, 62, said she has become so used to “unbelievable” events that when Mr Musk changed the icon for Twitter, now X, to Kabosu’s face in 2024, she “wasn’t even that surprised”.
