Bummer and Lazarus and Hachikō
Tokyo’s Shibuya Station is the fourth busiest train station in Japan, serving around two and a half million people on an average weekday. It has six exits. If you want to meet a friend at this sprawling, crowded transit hub, you’ll often just tell them to meet you at the exit named for a dog depicted by a small statue that sits nearby.
That dog, of course, is Hachikō. And thinking about Hachikō, and his story, was my original inspiration for Home Free.
Hachikō was an Akita born in 1923, and was owned by Hidesaburo Ueno, a professor of agriculture at Tokyo University. Every day, Hachikō would meet Ueno outside Shibuya Station and the two would walk home together. In May 1925, however, their daily ritual ended. Ueno had died at work, killed by a sudden cerebral hemorrhage. Ueno never returned to the station, but Hachikō continued waiting. Every day for the next nine years, at the precise time Ueno’s train would arrive, Hachikō appeared at the station, waiting in vain for the return of his human. Hachikō was history’s real-life Fry’s Dog.
It wasn’t until seven years into this daily display of loyalty that the rest of Japan learned about Hachikō, through an article published in the Asahi Shimbun newspaper. Hachikō became a celebrity, an example of loyalty and familial love that all should aspire to. A statue in his honor was erected in 1934 outside Shibuya Station, approximately a year before his death.
Another dog made famous for public displays of loyalty was a Newfoundland mix called Bummer, who lived in San Francisco in the early 1860s. San Francisco at the time had a large number of strays, and dogs were regularly trapped or poisoned. The city had an even larger number of rats, however, and the story goes that Bummer escaped the fate of so many other stray dogs in the city by showing an immense talent for killing rats.
Bummer soon became a fixture outside Frederick Martin’s Saloon, and survived by begging scraps from bar patrons and by scavenging on surrounding streets. Bummer was joined a year later by another dog, who had been badly injured in a fight. Bummer reportedly chased the aggressor away and nursed the wounded dog back to health, sharing his food and keeping his new friend warm at night. This second dog quickly recovered from his injuries, and was given the name Lazarus by witnesses.
The pair quickly became famous, and exaggerated accounts of their exploits were a regular feature in the local papers. In these stories, the two were highly anthropomorphized; Bummer was a noble gentleman, who had simply fallen upon hard times. Lazarus was a fickle mongrel, a schemer always working an angle. When Bummer was shot in the leg, the newspapers described his feelings of betrayal in great detail, as Lazarus had been seen scavenging with a different dog while his friend lay recovering for weeks. Once Bummer had healed, Lazarus returned, and the papers wrote excitedly about their reunion.
The pair continued prowling the streets together until Lazarus died in 1863, having either been kicked by a horse, or having been poisoned after biting a boy. Reports differ. Bummer died a couple years later, having been kicked by a drunk, who was arrested immediately, to avoid a violent riot among Bummer’s fans. Bummer’s fame had waned after the death of Lazarus, but his eulogy was still written by Mark Twain.
The story of Bummer and Lazarus is clearly underpinned by sadness and cruelty. The dogs were shot, possibly poisoned, allowed to subsist on scraps. And yet they achieved fame and escaped possibly even worse fates because of the stories that were told about them.
I wonder if the more heartwarming story of Hachikō is similar in some respects. He only achieved fame in the final two years of his life, and in the previous seven, witnesses reported seeing him pelted with rocks by school children and chased off by angry vendors. Even the motive behind his famous vigil is thrown into doubt by some: was he returning each day to Shibuya Station to look for his master, or to scavenge scraps of skewered meat?
We’re constantly telling stories about our dogs. We project onto them our feelings, our way of seeing the world. It’s impossible to know how well we understand them, but it’s irresistible to try, because they seem to understand us so well.
So this is the question that set Home Free in motion: What was life like for Hachikō? For Bummer and Lazarus? What was life like in the moments between their celebrated exploits, the daily grind that inspired no articles and no statues? If Hachikō had some other reason for returning to that station every day, what was it? Was Bummer really a noble gentleman, or just a hungry bully, blessed with quick reflexes and strong jaws and lucky enough to escape the dog catcher’s net?
And if Hachikō was animated by intense loyalty, and Bummer and Lazarus did have an unshakable friendship, it seems all the more incredible to understand those achievements within the context of basic animal drives like hunger, fear, and the need for shelter and warmth.
Home Free is never going to reveal some universal truth about life, or the plight of these dogs or of countless other creatures, but I hope there’s something in trying on someone else’s skin, in trying to see the world from another angle, that might help us understand the world a little bit differently.
