From "In Ghostly Japan" by Lafcadio Hearn

[butterflydreaming]

I am utterly charmed by this bit about a dog:

SHE is lean as a wolf, and very old,—the white bitch that guards my gate at night. She played with most of the young men and women of the neighborhood when they were boys and girls. I found her in charge of my present dwelling on the day that I came to occupy it. She had guarded the place, I was told, for a long succession of prior tenants—apparently with no better reason than that she had been born in the woodshed at the back of the house. Whether well or ill treated she had served all occupants faultlessly as a watch. The question of food as wages had never seriously troubled her, because most of the families of the street daily contributed to her support.

She is gentle and silent,—silent at least by day; and in spite of her gaunt ugliness, her pointed ears, and her somewhat unpleasant eyes, everybody is fond of her. Children ride on her back, and tease her at will; but although she has been known to make strange men feel uncomfortable, she never growls at a child. The reward of her patient good-nature is the friendship of the community. When the dog-killers come on their bi-annual round, the neighbors look after her interests. Once she was on the very point of being officially executed when the wife of the smith ran to the rescue, and pleaded successfully with the policeman superintending the massacres. "Put somebody's name on the dog," said the latter: "then it will be safe. Whose dog is it?" That question proved hard to answer. The dog was everybody's and nobody's—welcome everywhere but owned nowhere. "But where does it stay?" asked the puzzled constable. "It stays," said the smith's wife, "in the house of the foreigner." "Then let the foreigner's name be put upon the dog," suggested the policeman.

Accordingly I had my name painted on her back in big Japanese characters. But the neighbors did not think that she was sufficiently safeguarded by a single name. So the priest of Kobudera painted the name of the temple on her left side, in beautiful Chinese text; and the smith put the name of his shop on her right side; and the vegetable-seller put on her breast the ideographs for "eight-hundred,"—which represent the customary abbreviation of the word yaoya (vegetable-seller),—any yaoya being supposed to sell eight hundred or more different things. Consequently she is now a very curious-looking dog; but she is well protected by all that calligraphy..