David Wroblewski Answers Your Questions

Hello, Anne. Yes, as you say, Hachiko was a real dog and an Akita. I first learned about Hachiko back in the mid-1990s when I was doing early research for The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. The more I read, the more amazed I became, if only because I’d never heard of Hachiko before. I decided to find a way to include him, somehow, in the story. And so the basic facts of Hachiko's life (that he accompanied his owner, Professor Ueno, to the Shibuya train station in Tokyo each day, and met him there again each afternoon; that Professor Ueno died suddenly at the university; that Hachiko continued to come to the train station to greet his master for years afterward; that a statue in the dog’s honor was erected at the station even while he was still alive) are suggested in some of the letters Edgar finds, though I embroidered upon those events to tie them to Edgar's immediate predicament. 

I didn't mention that Hachiko was an Akita only because it didn't seem important for the story—John Sawtelle drew on many breeds to create the Sawtelle dogs, and what was significant was Hachiko's astonishing devotion, not his breed credentials. That, and the fact that John Sawtelle was sly and inventive enough to somehow wrangle a puppy from Hachiko's bloodline after reading about his situation in a newspaper.

By the way, 2008 has been a great year for Hachiko devotees. Besides his appearance in The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, Hachiko is mentioned in Martha Sherrill's superb book Dog Man, a biography of the man credited with rescuing the Akita breed from extinction after World War II. Hachiko is also the subject of a forthcoming motion picture, Hachiko: A Dog's Story, directed by Lasse Halström and starring Richard Gere and Joan Allen.

An excellent starting point to learn more about Hachiko is the Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hachiko.