I Am A Dog: Don Matsugoro on Bettering Our World ★
[Minor Spoilers for I Am A Dog: Don Matsugoro's Life]
True anime otaku behavior consists of checking out films and shows off the beaten path. Wagahai wa Inu de Aru: Don Matsugoro no Seikatsu, translated to I Am A Dog: Don Matsugoro's Life, is the anime equivalent of an unmarked gravel road in Nowhere, Kansas. Fuji Television aired this special for its first and only time on February 9th, 1983 and it never received a home video release of any kind. Without one viewer recording this singular airing on a Betamax tape and the amazing archivers at Kineko Video, we’d have no idea what this special even looked like.
Realistically, I Am A Dog: Don Matsugoro's Life is a middling special at best and it becomes clear while watching it why no one was clamoring for a home video release. The special has a meandering plot and feels unfocused in general, though there are plenty of anime worse than Don Matsugoro's Life. It’s not hard to put on and watch start to finish. The reason the special caught my eye enough to write about, outside of its obscurity, was its surprisingly refreshing take on approaching societal issues.
To briefly summarize the special to provide necessary context, the scene that caught my eye takes place after Don's owner, Kiyoshi, takes in Don’s girlfriend Ogin temporarily as her owner has been unfairly arrested by the police due to a bribe by the antagonists of the film. His owner didn’t realize this would include taking care of the sixteen stray puppies Ogin takes care of as she refuses to abandon them. Kiyoshi complains about the massive cost of vaccinating and licensing this many dogs, let alone feeding them. He becomes frustrated and decides to abandon some of the puppies, only to find another box of abandoned puppies where he planned to leave them. He brings every puppy home and works to temporarily become a dog shelter.
When Kiyoshi and his daughter Keiko try to find people to take in some of the puppies, they immediately fail as everyone they know says they don’t want to keep one. Then Keiko says the line that caught my attention, "This isn't going to work until the whole world becomes a better place." I was then surprised to see this animated children's special discuss how it is a deeper societal issue that hurts these dogs and the people around them. All of Keiko's friends actually like dogs, but have to live in apartments too small to keep them in or where they aren’t allowed. As Keiko says, "That's why we must make people's homes a better place to live, or else the dogs will keep suffering... Whenever people are facing struggles in their lives, dogs also end up facing the consequences."
I could easily quote Mahatma Gandhi and say, "Greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated," but since that quote is made up and he literally called for the euthanasia of dogs, I’ll quote Pearl S. Buck instead. "The test of a civilization is the way that it cares for its helpless members." In this special, dogs are an intelligent underclass of society, whether most humans know so or not. They don't have basic human rights and one of the special’s antagonists literally discusses how they are legally nothing more than property.
With all this in mind, Don challenges the audience with a question, "Do the Japanese have the strength and passion needed to make the world a better place?" Considering the quality of the rest of the special, it’s quite a poignant thought.
Keiko decides she wants to somehow get enough money to build "Dog Town" which will be a space with large houses that allow dogs and will have old people living in them so neither the dogs nor the elderly will be lonely. A lovely dream that the dogs decide even if the humans aren’t strong and passionate enough to make it happen, they will. Which eventually results in the kind of ending song I could imagine a bunch of anarchist trans puppy girls singing at a radical protest.
"Our dream will not stay a dream forever. And if the humans can't realize it, we, the dogs, will realize it instead! Bow-wow! Oh we will! Corrupt politicians, tax evaders, and profiteers. We will drive them all away! Bow-wow! We will drive them all away!" Get rid of those who refuse to represent the people? The rich who refuse to stop hoarding wealth and pay taxes to help the rest of us? People like war profiteers or anyone who unfairly hurts others to accumulate wealth? Sounds like a damn good goal quite a few people I know would eagerly agree with!
I Am A Dog: Don Matsugoro's Life isn't a secret far left masterpiece by any means, but it certainly had an important lesson to teach that I wish it had succeeded in instead of falling into obscurity. I don’t know if the live action movies based on the same book the special was based on, Don-matsugoro no seikatsu and Don Matsugoro no Daiboken, have similar blatant leftist themes, but it doesn’t seem so from the plot descriptions I could scrape up online. Anyone curious to see the special for themselves can find it on Kineko Video's YouTube or wherever cats go nya in case any rights holders take it down.
