On the 23rd October, I wrote a piece on Learning from Dogs about the innocence of dolphins and how some humans (not the correct term but it will do for now) sully the very soul of mankind by murdering these beautiful aquatic creatures.
Hopefully, the piece touched a folk with goodness in their hearts. Indeed, one such good person posted a lovely poem as a comment. That person was Sue of the Blogsite Dreamwalker’s Sanctuary. The poem deserved being made a post on here and so it’s an honour to do just that.
A Sanctuary for Inspirational Thoughts of Light, Love and Peace
Our Song, by Sue Dreamwalker
We are the giants that swim beneath the waves
Will you help our babies save?
Why do you Hunt us, why do you Kill?
Do you not realise what part we do play.
Singing our songs each and every day.
Vibration is what your world is held in
We balance your ocean along with Dolphin.
Now once again we are chased from the deep
Your awareness of us is what we do seek.
So painful a death as we face the harpoon.
Our calves are left orphaned to swim alone.
Our carcass is butchered, how long can we survive?
Our only escape is dive, dive, dive.
But connected to you we breathe the same air
Please listen to our despair.
For Our Song in lament we plead with you all.
For soon no longer will you hear our call.
Thanks Sue.
And do tune in next Monday (1st November) – another lovely story about dolphins.
I have been reading Will Hutton‘s latest book for the last couple of weeks and am now through the first 5 chapters, at the time of writing this Post! To my mind, it’s a very powerful and extremely well-argued summary of the sickness that has engulfed Britain, and by implication, other countries who have had similar experiences over the last 20 years.
There was a long extract published by the Guardian on the 26th September 2010 which gives one a good feel for the book. Here’s how that extract starts:
The British are a lost tribe – disoriented, brooding and suspicious. They have lived through the biggest bank bail-out in history and the deepest recession since the 1930s, and they are now being warned that they face a decade of unparalleled public and private austerity. Yet only a few years earlier their political and business leaders were congratulating themselves on creating a new economic alchemy of unbroken growth based on financial services, open markets and a seemingly unending credit and property boom. As we know now, that was a false prospectus. All that had been created was a bubble economy and society. Yet while the country is now exhorted to tighten its belt and pay off its debts, those who created the crisis — the country’s CEOs and bankers, still living on Planet Extravagance, not to mention mainstream politicians — all want to get back to “business as usual”: the world of 1997 to 2007.
There are many, many sentences in the book that have one gasping for breath. One of them that particular struck me was one on Page 13, see below for the sentence in italics. But let me include sufficient text to put the sentence into context:
Today, philanthropy or living according to a particular moral code does not confer status. Only money is able to do that. People start to question whether vocational career choices – in farming, teaching, medicine or science – make any sense when society rewards them so lowly while rewarding finance so high. Material values start to crowd out altruism, philanthropy and restraint.
Then comes this staggering reflection:
Two incidents in September 2007 highlighted the new values. Lance Bombardier Ben Parkinson, who lost both legs after a landmine exploded in Afghanistan, was offered £152,000 compensation by the Ministry of Defence. The very same week, Eric Nicoli left his job as CEO of EMI – having failed to turn around the company – with a pay-off of £3 million. [My italics]
Earlier, on page 6, Hutton writes of Richard Lambert, head of the Confederation of British Industry, the CBI as having said in March 2010, “for the first time in history officers of a company can become seriously rich without risking any of their own money.” Here’s another piece from that extract published in the Guardian:
We need a shared understanding of what constitutes fairness in order to restore our society. At present, there is none. The rich argue that it is fair for them to be so wealthy, in much the same way as Athenian noblemen believed that their riches were signifiers of their worth. They believe they owe little or nothing to society, government or public institutions. They accept no limit or proportionality to their wealth, benchmarking themselves only against their fellow rich. Philanthropic giving is declining; tax avoidance is rising; and executive pay is rising exponentially. All three are justified by the doctrine that the rich simply deserve to be rich. Meanwhile, the poor, in their view – and that of a virulent right-wing media – largely deserve their plight because they could have chosen otherwise. The mockery of chavs is premised on the assumption that they could be different if they wanted to be. The poor could work, save and show some initiative. So why should we indulge them by giving them state handouts?
This lies behind the arrogance with which bankers still defend their bonuses, in spite of everything that has happened over the past few years.
OK, you get my drift! I could go on and on but, hopefully, my point is made. This book by Hutton is going to be another of his classics and may well be seen as the ‘tipping point’ when society looks back in a decade’s time with that wonderful 20:20 hindsight!
Finally, are there other conclusions to be made of Hutton’s approach? Yes, of course. Reading the comments posted on the Guardian web page will show you many.
I had real trouble in writing yesterday’s Post about the appalling slaughter of the dolphins in Japan. Perhaps there was something out there in the ether that recognised the pain that I was sharing with so many thousands of other dolphin lovers.
Because while I was writing the article, into my in-box came something from Save Japan Dolphins about how close dolphins are to mankind, in DNA terms.
Seema Kumar, of Discovery Channel Online, writes that scientists have discovered that the genetic make-up of dolphins is amazingly similar to humans. They’re closer to us than cows, horses, or pigs, despite the fact that they live in the water.
Busbee says, “If we can show that humans are similar to dolphins, and anything that endangers dolphins is an equal concern for humans, it may be easier to persuade governments to keep oceans clean.”
And make it easier for all honest and loving people to join the fight to stop that most dastardly murdering of dolphins in Taiji, Japan.
If you do nothing else, at least sign up to receiving the latest news from Save Japan Dolphins – which is how this Post was conceived.
In Japan, fishermen round up and slaughter hundreds and even thousands of dolphins and other small whales each year.In the small fishing village of Taiji, entire schools of dolphins are driven into a hidden cove after a prolonged chase. Once trapped inside the cove, the fishermen kill the dolphins, slashing their throats with knives or stabbing them with spears. The water turns red with their blood, and the air fills with their screams.
While I follow a number of Blogs, there are few that I read avidly. One of them in that latter category is Baseline Scenario. I wish I understood more of the technical issues presented by the Blog authors and the dozens of brilliant commentors. But the essence of what is being discussed is clear. I thoroughly recommend subscribing.
Here’s a recent Post from James Kwak (see end of Post for bio details). It was called Free Books and Board Seats. James very kindly has given Learning from Dogs written permission to reproduce the article in full.
Here in the blogging world, some of us are very sensitive to the potential appearance of impropriety. A year ago, the FTC published new rules requiring bloggers to disclose cash and in-kind payments they receive for reviewing products. The upshot, for most of us, is simply that now, when we discuss a book, we say if we got a free copy of the book from the publisher. (Although it’s not clear that that disclosure is required, since getting a free copy is something that readers should expect; I don’t think the New York Times Book Review bothers pointing out that, for every book they review, they got a free copy, although they almost certainly did.)
All the more relevant, then, is Gerald Epstein’s post about conflicts of interest in the economics profession.
“Jessica Carrick-Hagenbarth and I did a study of 19 prominent academic financial economists who were members of two influential groups that have played a key role in the financial reform and regulation debate in the U.S. Of the 19 academic economists in these groups, 70% advised, owned significant stock in or were on the board of private financial institutions. But you wouldn’t know by looking at their self-identification in media appearances, policy work or academic papers.”
There are certainly economists who were talking up the housing market in the summer of 2008 without disclosing their financial ties to banks–who were desperately hoping that housing prices would not collapse.
C’mon, guys. I don’t even get very many free books (maybe one per month on average–I decline most of them), and I always disclose that. I know it’s not feasible to list every company that ever paid you to give a speech. But really, if you’re a paid director of a bank and you write about the banking industry, can’t you at least point that out?
Well put James.
—————————— James Kwak is a former McKinsey consultant, a co-founder of a successful software company, and currently a student at the Yale Law School. He is not, never has been, and never will be a member of the Yale Law Journal. He is a co-founder of The Baseline Scenario.
Pure luck in discovering things you were not looking for.
But the Buddhist belief is that there is no such thing as luck. See here:
The dictionary defines luck as ‘believing that whatever happens, either good or bad, to a person in the course of events is due to chance, fate or fortune.’ The Buddha denied this belief completely. Everything that happens has a specific cause or causes and there must be some relationships between the cause and the effect. (My italics.)
So you takes your choice! The Free Dictionary goes on to provide a fascinating account of the word history of serendipity:
Word History: We are indebted to the English author Horace Walpole for the word serendipity, which he coined in one of the 3,000 or more letters on which his literary reputation primarily rests. In a letter of January 28, 1754, Walpole says that “this discovery, indeed, is almost of that kind which I call Serendipity, a very expressive word.” Walpole formed the word on an old name for Sri Lanka, Serendip.He explained that this name was part of the title of “a silly fairy tale, called The Three Princes of Serendip:as their highnesses traveled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of….”
The work that the dedicated folks at WITNESS do is both humbling and uplifting and puts into perspective the value of what we do everyday.
Take 10 minutes from your busy day to view this video and then look at the WITNESS website to see what real change looks like. It will inspire you and enrich your life. It is important.
That reference to the charity WITNESS impressed me. Especially the fact that
Peter Gabriel
it was founded by that great musician Peter Gabriel.
Here’s the video mentioned in the extract above:
So how to close this particular post? Not sure, to be honest. But whether one believes in luck or not, there’s no doubt that we attract the world around us that we ‘deserve’.
As has been said before on this Blog, we get more of what we think about most. So really the Buddhist approach that there “must be some relationships between the cause and the effect” is more than sufficient reason to be a good and integrous member of this planet.
I don’t know about you but I’m picking up more and more ‘vibes’ from all over the place that strongly suggest an increasing awareness of the need for real change in society. Anyway, more of this another time.
My article today is base on an editorial in the Mole Valley Farmers Newsletter
MVF logo
for October 2010 (no. 557). First some background to this organisation.
Mole Valley Farmers was started in 1960 by a small group of farmers around South Molton* who were concerned by the discriminatory practices and the large margins being taken by many of their input suppliers. From the outset it was decided to treat all members equally, subject only to quantity allowance and that the Company would operate on the minimum margin to allow continuity and growth. Today it remains one of a few true co-operatives in the supply industry.
Mole Valley Farmers consists of:
Nine branches in the south west supplying a vast range of goods to farmers and the public alike. These range from farm requirements to clothing, footwear, garden supplies, pet food and accessories, domestic goods and power tools
Our own feed mills for all animal feeds
Fertiliser blending plants
A specialist mineral plant
A quality farm building division
Of special importance are our farmer customers who purchase animal feed, fertilisers and minerals, all manufactured to a high specification by Mole Valley Farmers and delivered direct from point of manufacture to farm or to branches for collection in small lots.
* South Molton is in Devon, England about half-way between Barnstaple and Tiverton and the history of this interesting firm may be found here.
I have to declare a certain interest in that when I lived in Harberton, Devon for a number of years, we were non-farmer Members of Mole Valley Farmers for feed for our chickens and ducks and later on for Pharaoh. So when I arrived to stay recently for a week with friends in Brixham, Devon, my eye quickly picked up the familiar look of the MVF Newsletter lying on the table.
This is the editorial, reproduced in full with the kind permission of the Newsletter editor, from the pen of David Burke, Chairman of MVF.
Commodity trading
Until relatively recently, the price of food was set by the forces of supply and demand for the food itself, which worked reasonably well in developed countries able to purchase in times of shortage. For the last century farmers have been able to reduce some of the market risk by forward selling crops to a trader in that market, at a price that fair to both parties.
This type of trading was tightly regulated and only those who were directly involved could participate and it worked well. At some time in the mid-90s, Goldman Sachs, with other financial institutions, successfully lobbied for the regulations to be abolished.
Forward contracts became derivatives, which could be bought and sold repeatedly by traders, which enabled the financial institutions to become involved. This type of investment really took off when the American and European pension market collapsed, together with that for normally traded derivatives like metals, prior to the recession, although actual food supply and demand remained relatively in balance. Last year Goldman Sachs reportedly made £3.2bn profit from derivatives trading.
In spite of Russia’s grain export ban and some other weather affected harvests, both the EU commission and the International Grains Council report more than adequate reserves of grain to meet demand and that the carry-over stocks are likely to be the second highest for years. The rumoured (but non-existent) wheat shortage that is driving up all feed prices, is entirely due to actions of the world’s principle investment bankers and their investors, which have serious implications throughout the globe. Whilst few in the developed world mostly in the Northern Hemisphere, will go hungry, it is a growing tragedy for the poorer countries in the Southern Hemisphere where three-quarters of the world’s population live. According to the Food and Agricultural Organisation, one third of the population lack food security and 792m people there are undernourished to varying degrees of starvation. But most damning of all, some 12m children die annually of malnourishment. Derivative speculation, which pushes up the cost of grains and in particular wheat, is responsible for food inflation that is proportionally greater for the impoverished nations.
Re-regulation of the basic food market to prevent a recurrence of the spikes of 2007 and 2010 would go some way to stabilising global food costs and help with developing nations, though without a great deal of pressure from compassionate people, this will be difficult, given the influence that the world’s richest investors have over governments. Alternatively, primary food producers worldwide are paid a high enough price for their produce to enable them to invest in research and best practice, as well as in efficient equipment. This concept received the approval of the European Parliament on 9th September and although they are considering legislation to ensure farmers receive a fairer share of the consumer price, it may be difficult to implement other than through a properly funded and regulated CAP.
Well said, Mr Burke.
NB. The web links in Mr Burke’s article have been inserted by me, they were not in the original article.
“You’ve got to do your own growing, no matter how tall your grandfather was.” Irish quotation.
In England, inexplicable happenings are commonly ascribed to being ‘Irish’! It’s meant in a loving way; there is a great deal of warmth towards the different ways that Irish people appear to see the world. But what is facing Ireland (and other countries) as a result of some distinctly unfunny goings-on in the USA is potentially hugely damaging.
To many the way that the world has descended into a dark, economic abyss, which is likely to affect us all in so many ways, and in which we are going to remain for a long time (a la Japan?), is also inexplicable.
Thus a chance comment from Norm Cimon to a recent post on Baseline Scenario set off a chain of discovery that for me has been very interesting. Here’s how it ran.
I have subscribed to Baseline Scenario for some time. It describes itself thus:
The Baseline Scenario is dedicated to explaining some of the key issues in the global economy and developing concrete policy proposals. Since it was launched in September 2008, this blog has been cited by virtually every major newspaper, Internet site, and blog covering economic and financial issues.
It’s a great resource.
A recent Post on Baseline Scenario, Irish Worries For The Global Economy, had already attracted 135 comments at the time of writing this post. A recent one was from a Norm Cimon, who is described in Linked In as the owner of Info Synchronicity LLC. This is what he said:
That is the other side of the coin. William Black has been lucid on this topic, and clear on the morality of the current age and how to fix it. Put people in jail and let everyone know why they were sent there. If you want to change perceptions then change the reality. The anger of the general public and the disdain of Wall Street are tied to that one issue. No one has paid for the crime of the millenium and everybody knows it.
And included was this recording of Bill Moyers interviewing Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Own a Bank is to Rob One.
Here’s the interview:
However, there’s more to this discovery than the YouTube video. If one clicks on the link behind Norm Cimon’s name on that Baseline post, then one is taken here. It’s a pdf of a paper written by Norm Cimon entitled, “Computing Power and Human Greed.” It seems to me to explain the tools, for want of a better word, that enabled the American banking system to behave in the way that Bill Black so roundly condemns in the Bill Moyer interview. Here’s how Cimon ends his paper:
With networked computers now cast by all organizations, including the financial sector, into the role of wizard-behind-the-curtain, we all live in Oz. It’s long past time we pull back the veil and call a halt to the mindless application of this supreme and supremely dangerous creation before the damage gets any greater.
Unfortunately, there isn’t a date to the paper but my guess was that it was written late in 2009. Whatever the date, it is a very apt observation.
Focus warning! This is a longer piece that usual but also a more important piece than usual. Please find the time to read it and explore the links. Thank you.
Many, many years ago I lived in Tamarama Bay, just East of Sydney,
Bronte Beach, Australia
Australia. It was a very short walk to Bronte Beach which was much better experience than the famous Bondi Beach about half a mile North of where we lived.
Thus when I saw the name Bronte Capital it caught my eye because of old resonances from the word “Bronte”.
OK, to the point!
John Hempton is a principle at Bronte Capital, an Australian fund manager. John is no slouch having been in his past a Chief Analyst for the New Zealand Treasury and Executive Assistant to the CEO of ANZ Bank in New Zealand. John’s CV is here.
Bronte Capital have a Blog – well who doesn’t – and it was a link to that Blog from Naked Capitalism that caused me to read a recent article from John about deregulation.
Despite me not understanding many of the technical aspects, it struck me with some force, so much so that I wanted to reproduce chunks of it on Learning from Dogs. John was gracious enough to give me written permission to so do! Thanks John.
I have just read Daniel Amman’s excellent biography of Marc Rich – the oil trader notoriously pardoned by Bill Clinton. I don’t want to get into the politics and ethics of the pardon other than to note that few things in it are black-and-white when you finished reading the book.
and a couple of paragraphs later explains that Marc Rich has a rather appropriate surname – well this is how John writes:
Marc Rich exploited price fixing/import/export controls to make simply unbelievable profits trading oil. Marc Rich & Co (the Swiss vehicle) was started with just over $1 million in capital and a couple of years later was making in excess of $200 million in profit. This level of profitability exceeds – by far – any other trading operation I have ever seen – and was probably the most profitable trading operation in history. Marc Rich & Co (since renamed Glencore) is possibly the most valuable business in Switzerland within the lifetime of its founder.
Just stop here for a moment.
This man, Rich, goes from one million dollars in capital to two hundred million dollars in profits in 2 years, give or take! Read on:
A typical Marc Rich & Co trade involved Iran (under the Shah), Israel, Communist Albania and Fascist Spain. The Shah needed a path to export oil probably produced in excess of OPEC quotas and one which was unaudited and hence could be skimmed to support the Shah’s personal fortune. Israel – a pariah state in the Middle East – wanted oil. Spain had rising oil demand and limited foreign currency but was happy to buy oil (slightly) on the cheap. Spain however did not recognise Israel and hence would not buy oil from Israel – so it needed to be washed through a third country. Albania openly traded with both Israel and Spain. Oh, and there is an old oil pipeline which goes from Iran through Israel to the sea.
So what is the deal? The Shah sells his non-quota oil down the pipeline through Israel and skims his take of the proceeds. Israel skim their take of the oil. Someone doing lading and unlading in Albania gets their take and hence make it – from the Spanish perspective – Albanian, not Israeli oil. The Spanish ask few questions. The margins are mouth-watering – and they all come from giving people what they really want rather than what they say they want. We know what the Shah wanted (folding stuff). We know what Israel wanted (oil). We know what Spain wanted (cheap oil). Who cares that Spain was publicly spouting anti-Israel rhetoric. [Similar trades allowed South Africa to break the anti-Apartheid trade embargoes.]
John explains:
It also helped that Marc Rich & Co was a (highly) multilingual firm. Rich is fluent in Spanish (it is the language he talks to his children in). He speaks English, German, Yiddish and presumably Hebrew. His business partner (Pincus Green – pardoned the same day as Rich) speaks Farsi amongst many other languages. They could do this deal because they could negotiate it and – deep in their heart they hold the Ayn Rand view that trade is a moral virtue and hence they do not need to be concerned with other morality. [The only line that matters is the law – and then it might not be the law of his adopted country – Switzerland – rather than the United States where he was resident.]
My italics, by the way. Just stay with me for a short while longer to ‘get’ John’s important message. Here’s John again:
The regulatory regime for domestic American oil was also perverse. Old oil (meaning wells drilled before the first oil crisis) received one price. New oil (wells drilled after the crisis) received a higher price. Squeeze oil (oil that was extracted from wells that ran less than 10 barrels per day) received a higher price still. The oil could be chemically identical and the price difference over $20 per barrel. Obviously a trader with a method (any method) of changing the oil source could make a fortune. Again I am not commenting on legality or morality. That was just plain fact. Ayn Rand applies – you give a value and you receive a value.
What all this regulation did was that it allowed people to make simply grotesque profits by thwarting regulation. The regulation thus worked less well and it was socially unfair. Pincus Green was good at negotiating in Farsi. He was astoundingly brave going to Iran immediately after the Shah fell. He was good at organising shipping. He worked really hard – but he did not invent something that changed the world and he wound up a billionaire. Traders make money by intermediating real business solutions – but these were real business solutions to problems made by legislation. Bad regulation, moral indignation about “trading with the enemy” or “trading with Israel” or with racists in South Africa made people with Ayn Rand morals exceedingly wealthy because you could arbitrage your way around any of these regulations.
OK, you are probably getting the drift of this important article from John. If any of this ruffles your hair, then read it all – it’s a very important message. This is what John is saying:
As a plea then I want a debate about the right form of regulation – a regulation that controls agency problems but does not allow arbitrage opportunities to people with “Ayn Rand morals”.
We are not going to get that from the current Tea Party Republicans. They simply argue that regulation (they say but do not mean all regulation) impinges on “freedom” (something that is clearly a good but hard to define). However many of the same people want planning regulations to ban a mosque in downtown New York because it is an insult to the victims of 9/11 (and banning mosques is not a restriction on “freedom”).
If that is the level of debate we are not going to get good re-regulation – we are just going to get pandering to whichever lobby group manages to garner most support. And that is a real risk because we will leave agency problems in place (they benefit the rich and powerful) and we will introduce the same sort of (dumb) regulation that made Marc Rich and Pincus Green astoundingly wealthy. That sort of regulation also benefits the rich and powerful – especially those with “Ayn Rand morals”. [The rich and powerful – if you have not noticed – are good lobbyists. Unless we are careful many amongst them will get their way.]
You didn’t rush those last three paragraphs, did you?
John concludes thus:
I don’t know how to do this well – but I thought I would state the obvious. The most obvious things that need regulation are things with a government guarantee (implicit or explicit). If you have an implicit guarantee (as we now know almost all large financial institutions have) then regulation really matters. If there are large agency problems (small shareholders, large management) then regulation should be deliberately biased to put power in the hands of shareholders not managers (eg banning staggered board elections).
Likewise other agency problems should be strongly policed and the regulation should be of the form that allows that policing. When Elliot Spitzer found that Marsh – a large insurance broker – was participating in bid rigging against schools buying insurance that was shocking – and is precisely the sort of thing in financial markets that should be policed strongly. But it took Elliot considerable effort to find and prove his case. The rules should be established so that sort of behaviour is really difficult to hide.
And I do not think that I need to explain to anyone how much mortgage brokers contributed to the crisis by (a) deliberately misleading borrowers about conditions on their mortgage and (b) participating in the faking of borrowers income/assets/education level when they on-sold the loans to Wall Street. Agency problems were at the core of the crisis.
On the other side if there is no agency problem then deregulation should remain the order of the day. Trade restrictions create arbitrageurs – and the arbitrageurs ensure the trade restrictions don’t work anyway.
There are obviously going to be extensions to this rough rule – and this post is really to garner discussion. But for a start I expect agents who benefit from their agency (and the abuse of their agency) to join the Tea Party.
It is difficult to get policy right. And when and if the policy is got right we are in for a very long fight to implement it.
I take my hat off to Mr John Hempton. He’s in the ‘finance’ industry, probably doing well, and yet he has the courage to hold a mirror up to the desperately immoral happenings going on around him.
It’s a real pleasure and honour to publish this Post.
Let me close with a short piece from the Sydney Morning Herald of the 2nd January, 2010.
John Hempton ... blog locally, act globally. Photo: Domino Postiglione
WHEN John Hempton started a blog as he recovered from pneumonia, he did not expect to send shockwaves through the finance industry.
But that is exactly what the 42-year-old fund manager did through his Bronte Capital blog. His exposé of an unrelated US hedge fund would eventually lead to $426 million in investments being frozen and authorities seizing control of the Albury fund manager Trio Capital shortly before Christmas.
We recently watched a film about an Akita dog called Hachi, Hachikō in Japanese, that demonstrates the loyalty that dogs can have for their human owners.
Here’s the official movie trailer. [UPDATE – for copyright reasons that movie trailer has been removed from YouTube.]
It’s a very moving film – seriously so! Expect to shed many tears. Even more so when one reflects that the Hollywood film is based, reasonably accurately, on a true story. The details of this story are in Wikipedia from which is quoted:
In 1924, Hidesaburō Ueno, a professor in the agriculture department at the University of Tokyo took in Hachikō as a pet. During his owner’s life Hachikō saw him out from the front door and greeted him at the end of the day at the nearby Shibuya Station. The pair continued their daily routine until May 1925, when Professor Ueno did not return on the usual train one evening. The professor had suffered from a cerebral hemorrhage at the university that day. He died and never returned to the train station where his friend was waiting. Hachikō was loyal and every day for the next nine years he waited sitting there amongst the town’s folk.
Hachikō was given away after his master’s death, but he routinely escaped, showing up again and again at his old home. Eventually, Hachikō apparently realized that Professor Ueno no longer lived at the house. So he went to look for his master at the train station where he had accompanied him so many times before. Each day, Hachikō waited for Professor Ueno to return. And each day he did not see his friend among the commuters at the station.
The permanent fixture at the train station that was Hachikō attracted the attention of other commuters. Many of the people who frequented the Shibuya train station had seen Hachikō and Professor Ueno together each day. They brought Hachikō treats and food to nourish him during his wait.
This continued for nine years with Hachikō appearing precisely when the train was due at the station
This hasn’t been the only film about this dog. See below:
Back to the Wikipedia entry:
That same year, another of Ueno’s faithful students (who had become something of an expert on the Akita breed) saw the dog at the station and followed him to the Kobayashi home (the home of the former gardener of Professor Ueno — Kikuzaboro Kobayashi) where he learned the history of Hachikō’s life. Shortly after this meeting, the former student published a documented census of Akitas in Japan. His research found only 30 purebred Akitas remaining, including Hachikō from Shibuya Station.
Professor Ueno’s former student returned frequently to visit the dog and over the years published several articles about Hachikō’s remarkable loyalty. In 1932 one of these articles, published in Tokyo’s largest newspaper, threw the dog into the national spotlight. Hachikō became a national sensation. His faithfulness to his master’s memory impressed the people of Japan as a spirit of family loyalty all should strive to achieve. Teachers and parents used Hachikō’s vigil as an example for children to follow. A well-known Japanese artist rendered a sculpture of the dog, and throughout the country a new awareness of the Akita breed grew.
Eventually, Hachiko’s legendary faithfulness became a national symbol of loyalty.
Hachikō died on March 8, 1935. He was found on a street in Shibuya. His heart was infected with filarial worms and 3-4 yakitori sticks were found in his stomach. His stuffed and mounted remains are kept at the National Science Museum of Japan in Ueno, Tokyo.
Hachiko
The Akita breed has a great reputation for loyalty. But knowing that doesn’t in any way weaken the power of the message for the present times.
A dog offers loyalty, trust and love in exchange for being treated, in turn, with integrity and compassion.
Learning from Dogs 