(Sakura) Atsuko Sato’s dog became world famous with a photo that inspired a wave of offbeat jokes online and the emblem of dogecoin, a cryptocurrency originally created as a joke, but from which Elon Musk infatuated.
But for Mme Sato, 62 years old, Kabosu is still the same faithful companion who accompanies him every day to his work in a kindergarten.
PHOTO PHILIP FONG, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
Atsuko Sato and the dog Kabosu
“It was so weird” to discover that Kabosu was an internet star, said his owner at her home in Sakura, Chiba Prefecture.
It all started in 2010 when she posted on her blog a photo of her dog, of the Japanese Shiba Inu breed, sitting on a sofa, looking mischievous and with her front legs crossed.
This innocent photo spawned a massive internet phenomenon: the “Doge” meme, where countless internet users used his image or those of other shiba inu for offbeat jokes on online forums like Reddit.
His most passionate admirers even made the original photo into an “NFT,” a copyrighted piece of digital art, which they then purchased for $4.2 million in 2021 by forming an online community, “ Own the Doge.”
“The Mona Lisa of the Internet”
“The Doge is the most popular dog of the modern era”, it is “the Mona Lisa of the internet”, estimates a member of this community of ultras met by AFP in Los Angeles and who is call it “Tridog”.
The collective also led a crowdfunding campaign for an outdoor statue of Kabosu, inaugurated at the end of 2023 in Sakura, and is preparing a documentary on the Doge phenomenon.
In the midst of “Dogemania” in 2013, a cryptocurrency was born in the same schoolboy spirit: dogecoin, which suddenly increased in value from 2021 after the whimsical and extremely wealthy multi-entrepreneur Elon Musk publicized his passion for it.
Elon Musk announced a space project supposed to be entirely financed in dogecoin: DOGE-1, a small satellite to be launched by his company SpaceX. Then he said that this cryptocurrency could be used to buy certain Tesla products, and in 2023 he briefly used a Doge icon as the logo for Twitter, the social network he bought (and eventually renamed X).
Billy Markus, one of the two co-founders of dogecoin, admits to AFP that he himself was surprised by the craze for this cryptocurrency, the concept of which was then imitated by a string of “meme coins”, with other mascots for emblems.
These are ultra-speculative investments because they are extremely volatile, their value depending on ephemeral trends, rumors and publicity stunts by personalities.
A single dogecoin is currently worth only 15 cents, but since this cryptocurrency is very abundant, its total capitalization weighs more than 23 billion dollars.
A tired icon
Atsuko Sato is far from all that. If she earned a lot of money thanks to the Doge’s NFT, she donated a large part of it to charitable organizations and also paid for it with medical treatments for her dog, who fell seriously ill at the end of 2022.
Kabosu now spends most of her time relaxing on a large cushion at home, where portraits of her and fan messages from admirers around the world adorn the walls.
And when Mme Sato works at the kindergarten, Kabosu is by her side in a dog stroller, where she obediently lets herself be petted by the toddlers.
As Kabosu was adopted from a shelter, her precise age is a mystery, but her owner believes she is around 18 years old, beyond the average life expectancy for shiba inus.
When Kabosu dies, “the world will mourn,” but “a legend lives on,” says Tridog.
He hopes people remember the “deeper values” of the Doge meme, which he says are “kindness, absurdity and not taking yourself too seriously.”
reference: www.lapresse.ca