Japanese dog of 'Doge' meme fame dies - RTHK
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Japanese dog of 'Doge' meme fame dies

2024-05-24 HKT 16:56
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  • The shiba inu dog called Kabosu, best known for the "Doge" meme, sits in front of a manhole cover featuring her image. File photo: AFP
    The shiba inu dog called Kabosu, best known for the "Doge" meme, sits in front of a manhole cover featuring her image. File photo: AFP
The Japanese dog whose photo inspired a generation of oddball online jokes and the US$23-billion Dogecoin cryptocurrency died on Friday, her owner said.

"She quietly passed away as if asleep while I caressed her," 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," Sato wrote.

As a rescue dog, Kabosu's real birthday was unknown but Sato estimated her age at 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, 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" – pronounced like pizza "dough" but with a "j" at the end.

The picture also later became an NFT 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. (AFP)

Japanese dog of 'Doge' meme fame dies