Dog behind the meme that launched Dogecoin is a shiba inu former rescue pup

In 2010, two years after adopting the shiba inu, Sato posted a picture on her blog of Kabosu crossing her paws on the sofa and giving the camera a beguiling look.

That image became the “Doge” meme – and later an NFT digital artwork that sold for US$4 million.

“She is pulling a weird face,” Sato laughs. “Now I think she looks really nice” in the famous photo but “at first I thought it could be trashed”.

The meme grew from an online forum post into an anarchic in-joke that bounced from college bedrooms to office emails.

“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 says.

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.”

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 2023, a US$100,000 statue of Kabosu and her sofa crowdfunded by Own The Doge, a cryptocurrency 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 US$1 million to Save the Children. The NGO says it is “the single largest cryptocurrency contribution” it has ever received.

“The Doge is the most popular dog of the modern era,” says Tridog, a pseudonymous member of Own The Doge, describing Kabosu as “the Mona Lisa of the internet”.

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 US$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,” says Dogecoin co-founder Billy Markus.

Markus, who is no longer affiliated with Dogecoin, was amused by the “silliness and innocence” of the memes.

Fellow founder Jackson Palmer “drank a beer and saw the doge meme and bitcoin in the news and thought saying he was gonna invest in Dogecoin would make a funny tweet”, he said.

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 says.

Since then, Dogecoin has been backed by stoner hip-hop king Snoop Dogg, Shark Tank entrepreneur Mark Cuban and rock band 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 cryptocurrency”.

Dogecoin has also inspired a plethora of other cheap and highly volatile “meme coins”, including spin-off Shiba Inu and others based on dogs, cats or Donald Trump.

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 its motto D.O.G.E, or “Do Only Good Everyday”.

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 cryptocurrency art collectors called PleasrDAO for US$4.2 million.

That makes it “a top-five most expensive photo ever sold”, Tridog says.

PleasrDAO split the NFT’s value into a brand-new meme coin called $DOG, allowing many people to collectively “own” the meme.

Own The Doge has brought fans and other meme stars to Japan to meet Kabosu and Sato, and it recently secured the intellectual property rights to the famous photo, paving the way to make Doge toys, films and other products.

As a rescue dog, Kabosu’s real birthday is unknown, but Sato estimates her age at 18 – past the average lifespan for a shiba inu.

When Kabosu dies, “the world will mourn”, Tridog says, 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.”