Hachi selfie, take four
Hachi was an extremely loyal dog, owned by a professor in Tokyo. Every day the professor would go to Shibuya Station, and Hachi would wait until the professor came home. One day, the professor died at work, and Hachi showed up and waited. And waited. And eventually got cared for by the general populace, fed and housed. Hachi would come back every day until he died nine years later.
Hachi is now a national legend in Japan. He has been blessed by their religion. His birthday is a federal holiday. To this day, “Hachi” is the most popular dog name in Japan; his name is synonymous with “Fido” in the States, with the popularity level of “Max.” There are numerous monuments to Hachi across the country, most famous among them being a small marble statue across from the entrance to Shibuya Station where he would always wait – which is now named Hachiko Gate, denoted with an icon of his silhouette absolutely everywhere.
I have so far taken three selfies at the Hachi statue. The first selfie dates to September 07, 2015, two days after I landed. The second was taken alone, on January 03, 2018. The third was taken on February 23, 2020. Like the pictures that people sometimes take on their birthdays, or the automated photo books that Apple trots out in front of you with light jazz music, you can see me getting older, grayer, a little more skin-mottled. My smile gets softer, turning into the sort of expression that you make when you’ve clearly seen some shit and are just happy to be here, vertical for another day. I gain a smile line in my eyes every time: wrinkles I’m happy to have. In one of them, Hachi is dressed in golden embroidered robes and a silk hat, since it was around the time of his birthday. Befitting Tokyo, it was softly raining.
This time, I booked my hotel around the Hachi statue; it is a block away. Despite how much I would rather fly into KIX, there’s really no easy way to avoid Tokyo when you are visiting Japan and live in Chicago. And so I’m writing this on the plane, and in 11 hours I’ll be dragging my zombified corporeal form onto the Narita Express, teleporting to Shibuya, walking to Hachi, and waiting in line for my pic. For the first time, I will almost certainly have a mask on.
Hachi qua Hachi has not changed. The lore of Hachi has remained rather consistent over time. And the statue is still there, clearly. But I have changed, and I’m going to keep changing. It is cliché to say that I have changed a lot since my last visit, because we all have, but that does not make it any less true.
At one point, I got weary of storing my entire photo library on my phone, and I especially got weary of seeing tens of thousands of photos dating back to 2004 alongside a person I no longer really speak to, with friends who cut me out of their lives, or of people who moved away or faded away or died. Hachi’s great, but I’d look at all of my other photos from Japan and wonder: who even are these people? Who am I? Why am I forced into this level of contemplation when all I wanted was to send more pics of my incandescently perfect dog to everyone I know while I’m on the bus?
And so I took every picture in my archive before March 09, 2021 – the day I got my first shot of the Juice – and threw it into deep storage, in a folder on a SSD that I back up to Cloudflare a few times a year. Now, the first photo in my library is a selfie of me wearing an “I’m Vaccinated!” sticker in a military tent that has a sign reading STRICTLY NO PHOTOGRAPHY PERMITTED on the wall. I don’t miss anything I took prior to this, bar a few dank memes and some legendarily ceremonial-grade images of my dog. I haven’t looked in the archive once since doing this. It’s all in the past now; the past is always practice for whom we are now, in this moment.
I fully reject the idea that I am ignoring anything by doing any of this. There is no sign reading “good vibes only” in this house. I have gone into my shadow more times than any of you can possibly comprehend over the past two years, and I have seldom blinked. And the photos are still there. My house, one I formerly built in co-creation, remains around me all the time. We exist on timelines of our own making. We have more volitional agency than any of us ever wants to believe. What I provide with my time & attention defines me. Deleting 90% of my camera roll is a liberatory act.
Hachi obviously teaches us a lot about loyalty. But within loyalty is no small measure of suffering. I don’t know if it’s documented whether Hachi went hungry, got rained on, or got hurt or sick, but he probably did. It’s also not clear whether Hachi expressed grief or pain beyond the unrequited hope that he felt every time he headed to Shibuya. What did the little guy feel?
On my own end, I consider myself to be a deeply loyal person, a fact that frequently backfires on me to my severe detriment. Some days I wonder if life would be any easier if I didn’t care as much about the people I love. Then I remember that Hachi literally has a statue of him, and my dog literally has an oil painting, and I start to wonder whether the real problem lies elsewhere.