But your dog is Japanese…

Black Hayate can secretly understand quite a lot of Japanese

We were sitting at an outdoor table, clutching our coffee mugs to warm our freezing fingers, watching the dogs playing in at the dog park. Because there are no parks near us and we don’t have a car, our shiba don’t get the off-leash socialisation they really need. Getting to a park requires an epic journey by bicycle and Doggyride trailer that takes an entire day and several bouts of motion sickness from Hayate, so we don’t do it as often as we should. On this particular day Hayate was getting a little over excited playing with a frightened looking toy poodle, so I called him over and asked him to sit for a treat. The women sitting at the next table turned to me with an incredulous expression and said (in Japanese): “Your dog can understand English? But he’s a Japanese breed!” I was too taken aback to know quite how to respond, so I just said that since we’d had him since he was a puppy he only understands English cues. By this point some other “dog park mums” had been attracted to the conversation, and a second woman helpfully contributed this gem: “But even though your dogs only speaks English, it can play with our Japanese speaking dogs fine. Isn’t that amazing?”

Amazing indeed.

Even in a Japanese dog park, we're the only ones with a shiba inu