Hello and welcome to the History of Japan podcast, episode 549, Dog Days, Part 1.

Today I want to focus on a story that is simultaneously, fascinatingly, and deeply interwoven

with the creation of Japan as a modern state, and seemingly, but not actually, so trivial that

I bet a great many of you have never really

even thought about it. Research into the subject is pretty new from a historical perspective,

and frankly, if someone had told me when I was still in grad school 10 years ago they were working on

it, I probably would have scoffed a little bit on the inside. Is this really a good use of research funding?

But life, my friends, is a process of growth, and I'm not ashamed to admit, my perspective

has widened somewhat with age and hopefully wisdom.

And with that perspective, I can see how the development of our modern relationship with

dogs could be a fascinating field of historical

research.

It's the sort of thing we mostly don't really think about.

Growing up in the developed world, there's just a certain type of relationship to dogs

that we have that is so normalized we don't really think about where it comes from.

But for a lot of humanity's history, our relationship with dogs was very different.

Dogs diverged from their wolf-like ancestors about 30,000 to 40,000 years ago during the tail

end of the last Ice Age. Dogs were among the first species we ever successfully domesticated and are the only large

carnivores we've done it with.

Cats are mighty in spirit, but less of a threat if they're not well-conditioned.

Of course, given the span of time involved, it's hard to say precisely where and when dog

populations diverged from their wolf-like ancestors, but certainly by the dawn of recorded

...