Shrine Nao Okada

                When I first thought about making a shrine, I had something different in my mind. However, I ended up dedicating my shrine project to my dog, Musashi who passed away five years ago when I was junior in high school. The shrine takes a form of a wheel chair for dogs, representing his illness which eventually took his life, and a small envelope which contains his hair (from his butt) and a photograph of a different dog we have been living with attached to the wheel chair. It commemorates my family’s memory of the days we spent with him for eight years, and the days which never came but live forever in our memory. It also implies that we have moved forward with a new family member, but we have never forgotten him.

                Musashi, a dachshund with soft reddish brown hair became part of my family in 2004. He was a puppy born from a dog of a friend of my father. I had been asking my parents for a dog for years by then, and finally my father took me to his friend’s house to show me puppies. I chose the largest and most active one which had the strongest appetite among five or six of his siblings.

Since he was the first pet for me, I learnt a lot about how it is like to keep animals as family members, such as how it is difficult to leave house for a long time, how important it is to keep the room air conditioned during summer, to keep him hydrated and fed no matter how long I want to stay in my bed in the morning during weekends. Besides these lessons, the most important thing I learnt from him is how it is like to lose family members. Until then, Luckily, I had not lost any of my family members since I was three years old when I was not old enough to understand death and keep that memory with me. So the death of our dog was practically first experience of loss.

The reason why the shrine takes the form of a wheel chair is not because he owned it, but because he never had chance to use it. The cause of his death was his second surgery for slipped disc, and we were notified that the second surgery would be the last treatment available for him to handle with his strength and size of the body. Before both the first and second surgery he had difficulty walking by himself, and it made us think about buying him a wheel chair for the purpose of preventing third surgery. However, he died after the surgery without coming back to consciousness even after the anesthetic wore off.

The wheel chair shrine provoke sad memory of loss because the shrine represents his absence, but at the same time, it generates an image of him running around with his wheel chair. Since we have never had chance to see him using a wheel chair in reality, the shrine allows us to create whole new “memory” of him running with it, without experiencing actual loss of the opportunity to see him running with it “again.” It is impossible to lose it because we did not have that real memory in the first place. Therefore, the wheel chair is not only a memorial of his death but also of himself.

In order not to focus only on his death, I did not include his picture on purpose to the shrine but one picture of the dog now we have after Musashi. This is because pictures of him instantly make us connect his image to the empty wheel chair to provoke the memory of the loss before imagining him running with it. Without adding his picture, in order to show the connection of the shrine to him, I added his element by attaching an envelope which has his hair inside, to the photo of another dog. The picture allows us to move on to the days without him but with the new dog who keeps our attention on him.