Bummer and Lazarus and Hachiko
Tokyo's Shibuya Station is the fourth busiest train station in Japan, serving around two and a half million people on an average weekday. It has six exits. If you want to meet a friend at this sprawling, crowded transit hub, you'll often just tell them to meet you at the exit named for a dog depicted by a small statue that sits nearby.
That dog, of course, is Hachikō. And thinking about Hachikō, and his story, was my original inspiration for Home Free.
Hachikō was an Akita born in 1923, and was owned by Hidesaburo Ueno, a professor of agriculture at Tokyo University. Every day, Hachikō would meet Ueno outside Shibuya Station and the two would walk home together. In May 1925, however, their daily ritual ended. Ueno had died at work, killed by a sudden cerebral hemorrhage. Ueno never returned to the station, but Hachikō continued waiting. Every day for the next nine years, at the precise time Ueno’s train would arrive, Hachikō appeared at the station, waiting in vain for the return of his human. Hachikō was history’s real-life
Fry’s Dog. […]
