BOOK REVIEW:

Hazuki Kajiwara, Surviving with Companion Animals in Japan: Life After a Tsunami and Nuclear Disaster. Palgrave Studies in Animals and Social Problems. New York: Palgrave Macmillan (2020). 

Japan has the most unique history and profound understanding of any nation in the world when it comes to the potential of nuclear power to destroy life. Survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, though thinning, are still heard and on anniversaries of 1945 events remind the country of the devastation that occurred from nuclear bombs. What happened in 2011, when the fourth largest earthquake in recorded history shook the coast of northeastern Japan and led to a tsunami and partial destruction of the nuclear power complex at Fukushima, has an analogy in Chernobyl and rings a frightening note to residents of the west coast of the United States, always concerned about the potential for a devastating earthquake to break apart nuclear reactors. Such results, however, will for most American readers remain a distant horror story.

Cats and dogs were left to fend for themselves after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, but even the worst weather disasters in the United States have shorter recovery periods than what followed with the hydrogen explosions in three of the six nuclear reactors at Fukushima in 2011, with a complete meltdown at one, leaving some nearby areas largely uninhabited to this day.

The need to deal with pets after disasters became evident in rescue efforts following Hurricane Katrina, where rescue rafts were directed not to take pets on board. Subsequent political pressure exerted by pet owners in Louisiana and elsewhere, and by well-funded animal welfare groups, was sufficient to enact the Pet Evacuation and Transportation Standards Act of 2006. Whether U.S. governmental implementation of this legislation will be adequate in subsequent disasters to protect pets as much as possible has yet to be tested, but at least a framework has been put in place.

For a detailed and often gripping description of what happened with pets and their owners in northeastern Japan in 2011 and afterwards, we now have Surviving with Companion Animals in Japan: Life After a Tsunami and Nuclear Disaster, written by Hazuki Kajiwara. 

Unfortunately, unlike the United States, the Japanese government has continued to insist that its responsibilities only extend to humans caught in such horrible circumstances. If people have pets, the government encourages the owners to evacuate them when practical but does not recognize that the owners have any right to keep the pets with them in temporary, government-provided accommodations. Thus, another tragedy following the devastating events of 2011, according to Dr. Kajiwara, is that government policy regarding disaster response remains entirely anthropocentric, meaning that the same consequences for pets and their owners could very well happen again if, and more likely when, massive numbers of people must be relocated because of weather calamities, nuclear power failures, a biological or environmental disaster, or war.   

Dr. Kajiwara, a sociologist at Rikkyo University in Tokyo, places her analysis of what happened to people and pets following the fourth largest earthquake recorded since 1900 and the largest ever experienced in Japan, within the interdisciplinary field of Human-Animal Studies (HAS).She observes that how a society conceives the relationship between owner and pet “often reflects previously unconsidered aspects of a society, such as the way power is distributed and embedded in the daily lives of its citizens.” 

The book amounts to an indictment of a government that has ignored the significance of the human-animal bond that is so important to the mental health of a great many of its citizens. Deftly summarizing an extensive psychological literature, Dr. Kajiwara shows that pet loss often slows the process of recovering from a disaster. Similarly, for those lucky enough to keep or later be reunited with their pets, responding to the shared trauma often deepens the connection pet owners feel with their animals.

Dogs and cats, which make up most of the pets of Japan, have a long history in the island country. Dogs were present by the Jomon period (14,000-300 BC), and cats at least since the Nara period (710-794 AD). Dogs were used as hunters and guards, and cats as eliminators of vermin, though both also formed social bonds with the people they lived with. As in other countries, pets became members of families. By 2017, 34% of households in Japan had a companion animal, but only 23% of households had a child under 18 years of age, a gap that Dr. Kajiwara says will widen in the future. A 2018 survey determined there were about 8.9 million dogs in Japan and it has been estimated that there are nearly 10 million cats in the country. 

Until the mid-twentieth century, dogs and cats often lived most of their lives outdoors, but changes in population density and social acceptance began to shift in the 1970s and 1980s and most pets now live indoors. This led to pressures on real estate developers. Only 1% of apartments sold in Tokyo permitted pets in 1998, but 86.2% do now. Many more statistics are provided to give the reader a detailed window into the place of pets in Japanese society, something that is difficult to see on a vacation in Japan, such as this reviewer experienced for a month in November 2019. (In Japan I had occasion to meet Dr. Kajiwara and in a long discussion encouraged her to pursue turning her thesis into a book.)

Dr. Kajiwara goes into detail about the horrors of the 2011 tsunami and earthquake, and subsequent nuclear meltdown, which brings into sharp focus the extent of the disaster with which the government was faced, with over 400,000 homes completely or partially destroyed. The explosions at Nuclear Power Plant One in Fukushima blanketed an extensive area that had to be kept free of nearly everyone. Eight years after the accident, only 23.2% of residents have returned to the most affected districts, and only 6.2% in towns close to Fukushima, and about 40,000 former residents remain in evacuated status. Between 10,000 to 20,000 pets were left behind by evacuated owners. Less than 1,000 were ultimately rescued. The government did provide for pet food to be taken into tsunami-destroyed and nuclear-contaminated areas, and set up facilities where animals could be tested for radiation. 

Dr. Kajiwara, once a journalist and still a columnist for Tokyo’s Asahi Shimbun, has a novelist’s eye for detail and drama, particularly in the descriptions of what happened to people she interviewed extensively regarding their experiences with their pets during and after the disaster. She divides these accounts into two general categories, (1) those whose lives were altered by the tsunami, but who were generally outside of the nuclear-contaminated zones, and (2) those who were in the nuclear-contaminated areas.

For the nuclear-contaminated zones, Dr. Kajiwara examines the experiences of Hitomi Sato, a 56-year-old woman who lived in Fukushima. She does not jump immediately into Ms. Hitomi’s relationship with her cats and a dog but spends some beautifully descriptive pages letting us understand this woman:

Hitomi has lived with various kinds of animals in the farmhouse since she was small. Hitomi was brought up with warmed goat milk, drinking it through a straw made from a stock of the wheat because her mother didn’t have enough of her own milk. The family always had several cows and brought up their calves with great care and affection. Though Hitomi had a strong attachment to the calves, they were also an important source of income for her family.

Hitomi's evacuation had to be almost simultaneous, allowing her now time to search for her pets.  Returning while the area was still high-risk, Ms. Sato finds her dog but cries because she knows she cannot not take him with her. Anyone who entered the evacuation zone had to be screened for radioactivity upon leaving. Eventually the government allowed for the possibility of removing animals:

Owners leashed their animals to a secure anchor in front of their houses to later be picked up by a prefectural operative for radiation screening. Smaller animals were caged and placed in front of the house.  The animals were then brought back to their owner. When guardians were unable to live with their pets, the animals would be accommodated at the animal shelter run by the Fukushima Prefecture Animal Rescue Headquarters.

Hitomi was eventually reunited with her dog in this way, but in the next year had to suffer the agony of watching him die of cancer. She continues to search unsuccessfully for her cats.

The final part of the book reviews the theories that have been argued for creating a legal basis for guaranteeing the survival of pets and keeping them with their humans after a disaster. Dr. Kajiwara finds most of these theories inadequate to justify policy decisions. For instance, giving owners rights to the survival of their animals merely because they are owners of the animals, is entirely too anthropocentric and fails to consider animals as anything more than property, making rights as to them little different from rights to an expensive car or piece of art. She argues that instead “a right positioned between human rights and animal rights is required.” Therefore, she proposes a “bonding rights” argument, noting that animals could be regarded as members of society.

While Dr. Kajiwara promises to continue to flesh out the bonding-rights argument in future work, as a lawyer this reviewer was left with questions as to whether such a concept, as a basis for policy to create practical legislation and regulation, could work in practice. Ultimately, there must be a clear interface between policy and application, between theory and enforcement in the operation of government. How is a member of society that cannot speak the language of social governance to be given a voice? If the owner speaks for his pet, when is the owner replaced in this function if his or her decisions are in fact not in the animal’s interests? Is a separate group composed of veterinarians, shelter operators, and owners, and perhaps even non-owners, to be constituted to determine the best interests of the animals in any given situation, such as a disaster?  As Dr. Kajiwara points out, even veterinarians are often part of the commercial pet industry, a point she proves by noting that the Vice President of the Japan Veterinary Medical Association argued that the governmental recommendations regarding the evacuation of pets did not presume any right of pet owners to have a place to bring their pets if they could not find such a place on their own. Also, who speaks for the strays, abandoned animals, and animals that have lost their masters to the disaster?  Governmental operations and authority tend to break down in disasters and putting in place a system that would be complicated and difficult to implement even in ordinary times seems highly questionable as a policy recommendation. I eagerly await Dr. Kajiwara's elaboration of her solution.

Although most of the book reads well—often beautifully—it is an adaptation of Dr. Kajiwara’s doctoral thesis and occasionally suffers from maintaining certain thesis conventions. Some methodological and qualification paragraphs would have been best eliminated and do little more than tell the reader what is coming. While this can be justified in a scientific paper where the writer must detail the order of the evidence that will be presented, in a book for a general audience it is unnecessary. It would be best to just get on with it.  Still, there were only a few pages where this reviewer felt inclined to skip forward, and the overall presentation is effective and often captivating. 

Such quibbles are minor however and should not deter anyone interested in the impact of disasters on pets should be sure to put this wonderful volume in the reading queue. Anyone with an interest in pets, who is planning to travel to Japan for the Olympics or otherwise, will find much in the volume that will explain the place of pets in Japanese society.   

The Dog at the Last Supper (Franciscan Monastery, Hvar, Croatia)

Detail of Last Supper of Matteo Ingoli, Hvar

Matteo Ingoli, born in Ravenna between 1585 and 1587, worked in and near Venice, but died young when a plague swept across northern Italy in 1631. Among the relatively small number of works commonly attributed to him is a Last Supper in a Franciscan monastery at Hvar, Croatia, which I had the opportunity to photograph in September 2017 (no flash was the only restriction at the monastery, which is now a museum). The Last Supper was a theme Ingoli may have painted several times. Another treatment of the subject is in the church of St. Apollinare at Ravenna. As will be discussed further below, the attribution of the Hvar painting to Ingoli continues to be disputed.

The painting is in serious need of restoration. Ingoli’s current standing among Renaissance artists, however, is probably not such that any institution would easily commit the necessary funds. Nevertheless, the depiction of the Last Supper is unique in including a dog, which can be seen at the extreme right of the painting where the animal comes from behind a pillar next to a beggar lying before the table on which the meal has been served. 

Because of the overly bright flood lights in the room where the painting fills an entire wall, I was unable to get a full shot of the painting that is worth posting here. Ingoli's Last Supper in Ravenna has been more extensively studied and good photography of it is widely available, but for the one in Hvar I could find no good reproduction of the entire painting online.

Could There Have Been a Dog at the Last Supper?

No dog is mentioned in any of the gospel narratives of the Last Supper, but the gospel writers were certainly familiar with the presence of dogs at places where people were eating. In Matthew 15:27, a woman says to Jesus that dogs eat scraps that fall from the master’s table, while the variation of the parable at Mark 7:28 refers to dogs under the table eating the children’s scraps. (Such situations need not be accidental. Almost anyone who grows up with dogs remembers slipping something unappealing to a willing accomplice under the dinner table.)  

Detail of Last Supper of Matteo Rosselli

The dog at Hvar has its right leg slightly lifted. Although my eye is untrained in such matters, I am inclined to think this is more a begging posture than an attempt by the painter to suggest that the dog is walking forward. The apostle at the end of the table is preparing to drop something into the bowl the beggar stretches towards him and the dog may be hoping to be the next recipient of the apostle's generosity. 

Who is the sympathetic apostle? The order the figures in Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper in Milan is known from the artist’s notebooks. For da Vinci, the figure on the extreme right was Simon the Zealot, though there is no beggar in his version. Somewhere in the annals of Renaissance research there must be a study of the order of apostles in the countless depictions of the Last Supper, but whether there would be any discussion of Ingoli's painting in Hvar is more than doubtful. Hopefully the joy of visiting Hvar in the summer (with its wonderful beaches and great but reasonably priced restaurants) will appeal to some art historian and the painting will in time receive renewed attention from the art world.

Other Artists Who May Have Painted the Last Supper in Hvar

The monastery caption to the painting in Hvar notes that the work was formerly attributed to Matteo Rosselli (1579 – 1651). Curiously, Matteo Rosselli painted a Last Supper (1613 – 1614) and included a cat before the table. Here I have extracted a detail of the cat from a reproduction posted by Wikimedia Commons. This painting is currently in the Conservatorio di San Pier Martire in Florence. Another painter with the last name of Rosselli, named Cosimo (who, that I can tell on minimal research, was unrelated to Matteo), had, more than a century earlier (c. 1481-2), put two cats at the Last Supper in a panel of the Sistine Chapel. Other attributions of the painting in Hvar include Matteo Ponzone or the school of Palma il Giovane. Ponzone is credible as his brother was archbishop of Split from 1616 to 1640 and he worked much of his life in Dalmatia.

Shepherds with dog on Nativity Facade, Sagrada Familia (Barcelona)

Dogs in Biblical Scenes 

There is a long and honored tradition of placing animals in depictions of biblical events. Both the architect, Antoni Gaudi (1852 – 1926), and the French painter, Octave Penguilly-L'Haridon (1811 – 1872), place sheep dogs with the shepherds coming to the manger in Bethlehem. While Penguilly-L'Haridon modeled the dogs of the shepherds on sheep dogs he had seen with Bedouin herds on a visit to the Holy Land, Gaudi instead used a Catalan sheep dog as his canine model for the Nativity Facade of the Sagrada Familia. There is also a dog on the Passion Facade of the great church in Barcelona, though that one has a much harsher aspect. I photographed both dogs in 2015.

Conclusion

Art history perhaps focuses too consistently on the great artists, on those with a large opus who have been studied and revered for generations, leaving aside those whose skills were high but who never acquired a reputation sufficient to put their works in the best museums or onto the toniest auction blocks. Such is the case with Matteo Ingoli, whose works make up a short list, and without any current scholar telling the art world that a minor genius has been relegated to undeserving obscurity.  Nevertheless, he has done dog lovers a favor by placing a dog in the midst of a pivotal moment in the seminal history of a great religion. 

Monograph on Dogs of California Aboriginal Cultures Published

I have completed a monograph, published by the Land of Oaks Institute in the California Cultures Monograph Series (ISSN 2333-9667), which can be downloaded at no cost in iBook or pdf format. Go the the website for the Series and scroll down to the list of monographs. It is the most recent one posted. By drilling down, you will come to a page that offers the two download options.

What surprised me as I went through hundreds of ethnographic sources was that even by 1900, when Professor Alfred Kroeber began studying the tribes of California intensely, he and his colleagues and graduate students at Berkeley had to rely on historical sources and informant memories to describe what the dogs of the tribes used to look like. Their photographs of Native Americans, which often included dogs, almost invariably showed dogs of identifiable European breeds or mixed breeds, with very little indication of surviving aboriginal canine genetics. This is, of course, consistent with a growing body of genome research indicating limited survival of pre-European contact types of dogs in the Americas. The reasons for the largescale disappearance of most aboriginal canine types are very complex, even within the 83 California tribal groups studied by Kroeber and other ethnographers, including Spanish priests leaving out poison for dogs so that tribes would become more dependent on their missions and genocide of Native Americans and their dogs who were living too close to mining operations. Not all the blame for the disappearance of aboriginal dogs lies with conquistadors, missionaries, settlers, and miners, however, since some tribes began to prefer European dogs for hunting deer and elk, particularly in the northern and mountainous parts of the state.

This is a topic I will be pursuing on a broader scale for the Americas.