Even with her frail fluffy face, Kabosu maintains the mysterious smile that made her the favorite meme dog among millennials and the inspiration for Elon Musk’s $23 billion cryptocurrency. Although most people recognize her as the Dogecoin logo, Atsuko Sato knows Kabosu as the elderly rescue puppy that goes to work with her every day at the kindergarten.
Sato told AFP in Sakura, where Tokyo’s eastern sprawl gives way to rice fields and solar panels, “it felt so strange” to learn her dog was an internet celebrity.
Two years after the shiba inu’s adoption, in 2010, Sato shared a photo of Kabosu on her blog showing her crossing her paws on the couch and offering the camera a seductive glance.
Later on, that picture turned into the “Doge” meme and an NFT digital artwork that brought in $4 million.
Sato laughed, “She’s pulling a weird face.” “I think she looks really nice now, but at first I thought it could be trashed” in the well-known picture.
From an online forum post, the meme developed into anarchic in-jokes that spread from office emails to college dorm rooms.
“One of my friends messaged me: ‘Isn’t this picture Kabosu?’ Then I searched for it and found all sorts of memes, like Kabosu turning into a doughnut,” Sato said.
The 62-year-old is now so used to “unbelievable” events that when Tesla boss Musk changed the icon for Twitter, now X, to Kabosu’s face last year, she “wasn’t even that surprised”.
“In the last few years I’ve been able to connect the online version of Kabosu, all these unexpected things seen from a distance, with our real lives.”
‘Mona Lisa of the internet’
Kabosu spends most days resting in a cart at the kindergarten or on a big cushion at home, where fan-made Doge tributes adorn the walls.
The memes typically use goofy broken English to reveal the inner thoughts of Kabosu and other shiba inu “doge” — usually pronounced like pizza “dough” but with a “j” at the end.
“Very love. Such star OMG. So heart. Much drawing,” says one framed print using this signature “doge speak”.
Kabosu fell ill with leukaemia and liver disease at the end of 2022, and Sato is sure the “invisible power” of prayers from fans worldwide helped her pull through.
Then in November last year, a $100,000 statue of Kabosu and her sofa crowdfunded by Own The Doge, a crypto organisation dedicated to the meme, was unveiled in a park in Sakura.
Sato and Own The Doge have also donated large sums to international charities, including more than $1 million to Save the Children. The NGO says it is “the single largest crypto contribution” it has ever received.
“The Doge is the most popular dog of the modern era,” said Tridog, a pseudonymous member of Own The Doge, describing Kabosu as “the Mona Lisa of the internet”.
‘People’s crypto’
Dogecoin was started as a joke by two software engineers and is now the world’s eighth most valuable cryptocurrency with a market cap of $23 billion.
“The Doge meme was pretty big on the internet in 2013 and I spent a lot of time on Reddit and other forums back then,” Dogecoin co-founder Billy Markus told AFP.
Markus was entertained by the “silliness and innocence” of the memes; he is no longer associated with Dogecoin.
According to fellow founder Jackson Palmer, “I thought it would be funny to tweet that he was going to invest in Dogecoin after seeing the doge meme and Bitcoin in the news while drinking a beer.”
Markus found the idea “hilarious” and created the coin in “a few hours” before contacting Palmer and taking it live.
“Lots of weird stuff happened after that,” he said.
Since then, Dogecoin has been backed by stoner hip-hop king Snoop Dogg, “Shark Tank” entrepreneur Mark Cuban and Kiss bassist Gene Simmons, who once tweeted: “I bought Dogecoin… six figures.”
But its most keen supporter is probably the billionaire Musk, who jokes about the currency on X — sending its value soaring — and hails it as “the people’s crypto”.
Dogecoin has also inspired a plethora of other cheap and highly volatile “memecoins”, including spin-off Shiba Inu and others based on dogs, cats or Donald Trump.
– ‘Legend lives on’ –
A solitary figure wearing a Doge mask looks out over the Los Angeles skyline — this is Tridog, who says he has “worked for a dog photograph for almost three years”.
Own The Doge is his full-time job, and he preaches their motto D.O.G.E, or “Do Only Good Every Day”.
In 2021, Sato sold the viral photo of Kabosu as a non-fungible token (NFT), a digital ownership certificate that can be traded online, to a group of crypto art collectors called PleasrDAO for $4.2 million.
That makes it “a top-five most expensive photo ever sold”, Tridog told AFP.
The value of the NFT was divided by PleasrDAO into a brand-new memecoin called $DOG, enabling a large number of people to “own” the meme jointly.
In addition to arranging for fans and other meme stars to meet Kabosu and Sato in Japan, Own The Doge recently obtained the intellectual property rights to the well-known image, opening the door for the production of Doge toys, movies, and other goods.
Since Kabosu is a rescue dog, her true birthday is unknown, but Sato calculates that she is 18 years old—older than the typical Shiba Inu lifespan.
When Kabosu dies, “the world will mourn”, Tridog said, but “a legend always lives on”.
He hopes people will remember “the deeper values” behind the Doge meme: “the wholesomeness, the silliness, the not taking yourself too seriously.”
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