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Did you know that service dogs, which support daily lives of people with disabilities as their arms and legs, are backed by the Australia-Japan relationship? At the Japan Service Dog Association (the Association), not only do they nurture service dogs, but also carry out educational activities to increase understanding of their role in society. The Association collaborates with Australian organisations that engage in advanced work with service dogs, seeking advice on nurturing and breeding practices. We spoke with Ms Koto Mizukami, the General Manager, about the current state of training service dogs , challenges in Japan, and the lessons that can be learned from Australian society.
Service Dogs: supporting the daily lives of people with physical disabilities
ー What roles do service dogs have?
Service dogs support the daily lives of people with physical disabilities. While guide dogs and hearing dogs specifically assist individuals with visual or hearing disabilities, service dogs help those with mobility challenges – acting as their arms and legs. Users of service dogs suffer from a range of limitations; some have hemiplegia, others rely on electric-powered wheelchairs, other rely on a cane to walk, etc. Living with a service dog also brings secondary benefits, such as reducing users’ anxiety when they leave the house alone, and giving their family the confidence to leave the house with peace of mind. These effects can deepen the engagement of people with disabilities with society through the support of service dogs.
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Service dogs perform a variety of tasks depending on the user’s needs. Some of the most common tasks include (1) picking up dropped objects (2) retrieving objects on command (3) securing a method of emergency contact (4) opening and closing doors (5) removing items of clothes (6) supporting wheelchair use (7) assisting their owners to stand/walk (8) flicking switches. But the role of service dogs is tailored to the user’s needs, so the tasks are not limited to these. Service dogs may use their nose, front legs, or sometimes their entire body to carry out their required tasks.
Retriever breeds such as labrador retrievers or golden retrievers are the main breeds used as service dogs. They were chosen because retrievers were originally bird dogs, they like to hold things in their mouths and are known to love doing things with people.
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ー Please tell us about the Japan Service Dog Association’s activities.
At the Japan Service Dog Association, we train service dogs as well as their handlers. We also carry out educational activities to increase awareness about the importance of service dogs and other assistance dogs. Based out of ‘Cynthia’s Hill – Service Dog General Training Centre’ in Nagakute city, Aichi prefecture, we aim to send three service dogs to people with physical disabilities each year.
Generally, we provide service dogs free of charge to individuals in need, but we ask users to bear the cost of taking care of the dogs at their homes; about 200,000 yen each year. Individuals also must have the knowledge to care for the dogs, such as bathing or grooming, when they welcome them into their homes. Therefore, we assess not only the dog’s suitability but also the individual’s suitability when deciding on pairing. During the assessment, we consider aspects like the individual’s level of independence, whether a service dog will actually help to support their participation in society, their ability to care for the dog with love, and their sense of responsibility as a service dog user during social participation.
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Once we decide on pairing, we ask the individual requesting a service dog (trainee) to join our training centre for approximately two weeks of joint training. After that, the training continues in the trainee’s home environment for about a month. During this at-home training, the pair will undergo training based on the room’s layout as well as at the trainee’s workplace and other regularly used facilities. Once the pair passes the certification exam and the service dog is officially leased to the trainee, our staff will visit them regularly, in order to understand the condition of both the user and the dog, and provide additional training if necessary. We visit the trainee’s home and conduct training based on their room layout. Service dogs just love doing things with people, so we aim to train them in a fun and playful way, just like playing a game.
Welcoming two puppies from Guide Dogs Queensland in 2015
ー Please tell us about the relationship between the Japan Service Dog Association and Australia.
Australia conducts progressive work to train and breed service dogs and other assistant dogs. We have received much advice and support from Australia. Close cooperation between the Association and Australia started in 2015, when Guide Dogs Queensland sent two puppies to us after they received grants from the Australia-Japan Foundation.
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Following that, in 2016, the Japan Service Dog Association received funding from the Australia-Japan Foundation, and we invited Ms Lauren Elgie, who is a specialist in breeding service dogs, originally from Guide Dogs Queensland and she kindly gave us a lecture on training and breeding service dogs. We welcomed an additional two puppies then, and they are Wolfie and Belle. Wolfie gave birth to seventeen puppies at our facility where one is now a breeding dog, one is a trainee dog, and another works as a guide dog.
We received funding from the Australia-Japan Foundation again in 2019, which we used to invite Lauren for a second time and we were planning to hold a workshop on service dog breeding but it was postponed due to COVID-19 … We ended up hosting an online workshop in 2020. At the workshop, there were active discussions about breeding plans and training, as well as introducing frozen semen from new breeding dogs. Thanks to the frozen semen that was implemented with the funds received from the Australia-Japan Foundation, 23 puppies were born, and they currently work across a range of areas.
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ー Did you have previous engagement with Guide Dogs Queensland?
When the International Guide Dog Federation’s (IGDF) conference was held in Tokyo in 2014, the Japan Service Dog Association’s then-Chairman Takayanagi invited representatives and members of Guide Dogs Queensland to our training facility. That was the beginning of our engagement. Then, in 2015, it was our turn to visit Guide Dogs Queensland in Australia and that was when they suggested gifting us the two puppies.
After that, in 2016, Lauren visited Japan and cooperation between our organisations strengthened. Each time we had a question about delivering puppies, mating combinations, or caring for the puppies’ health after they are born, Lauren, who is a specialist in training and breeding assistance dogs, kindly gave us advice.
Specifically, she advised us to establish a system that enables the use of frozen semen making it easier to incorporate high-quality overseas pedigrees into our breeding program. As a result, we were able to create an environment for artificial insemination using frozen semen. In addition, she taught us things we had not considered ourselves, such as feeding fresh meat instead of just increasing the amount of dry food during the rearing period out of consideration for the strain placed on the mother’s stomach. We have implemented it.
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Starting new initiatives: Dog Intervention®
ー Are there any new initiatives that started with your engagement with Guide Dogs Queensland?
There’s a new initiative called Dog Intervention® (DI). This initiative aims to bring out people’s smiles and enthusiasm through dogs. It is essentially animal-assisted therapy or animal-assisted activity. For example, our DI dogs® we send out to hospitals work with healthcare professionals to support individual patients and aim to increase patient’s enthusiasm and decrease stress for patients who are going through rehabilitation or require challenging treatments.
For example, there is a child who was born with a health condition and requires frequent surgery. They used to cry a lot and hated entering the operating room. However, once they started going into surgery with a DI dog®, they stopped crying. In fact, I was told the child even went into surgery with a smile on their face. Their parents considered stopping the surgeries because it was heartbreaking to see their child cry each time, but they tearfully shared that the DI dog® helped change their child’s fear of surgery. In another case, during a terminal care (end-of-life care), a bedridden female patient began smiling after our DI dog® intervened. While waiting for the DI dog® to visit, she would do her hair and put on makeup, and would constantly say her time with the DI dog® was ‘filled with happiness’ right up until a few days before she passed away. I’m always amazed by our dogs when I hear stories like these.
We also have an initiative called ‘With You Project’ where we send our dogs to households with an individual or child with disabilities after close consultation with them. There are many families who want a dog but may not be confident that their child with a disability can welcome a dog into their home, or that life with a dog would suit their lifestyle. Because we have raised the dogs for over a year and understand each of their personalities and characteristics, we are able to introduce dogs that suit each household’s circumstances. Families can decide whether they want to welcome a dog into their home after meeting them or having a trial period. We provide advice during the trial period. Even if the matching process is unsuccessful, the dogs still have a place they can call home, so no one is unhappy. This is a new project that aims to provide opportunities to connect people with the community through dogs.
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Not all puppies who were born as service dog candidates become service dogs. There are dogs that get distracted by moving objects, or dislike crowds. There is nothing more misfortunate than forcing these dogs to become service dogs. So, we want to provide other stages for them to shine through initiatives like Dog Intervention or the With You Project.
Actually, of the 23 puppies that were born using frozen semen through funds we received from the Australia-Japan Foundation in 2019, two are trainee dogs, one is a breeding dog, one works as a DI dog® and nine are spreading happiness to people through the With You Project.
Towards a society that says ‘you must be so happy’ to service dogs
ー What role does Australia play in the field of breeding and training service dogs?
The environment for welcoming service dogs into society is clearly more progressed in Australia. For instance, Australians would look at a service dog and say ‘oh, aren’t you lucky to have a role’. That’s because they know the service dogs are taken good care of by the owners and that the dogs are happy because the roles given to them take into account the breed’s characteristics. On the other hand, the majority of Japanese people look at service dogs or guide dogs and feel ‘sorry they are made to work’. Even this single point shows the difference in understanding within society.
There also is a tendency to not allow Japanese service dogs to get trained at public facilities until they have matured, but in Australia they are trained while they are puppies. During my on-site inspection at Guide Dogs Queensland, I have seen volunteers accompany the puppies so they can practice getting on trains and conduct socialization training at shopping malls. It felt like society as a whole was supporting the service dogs’ training.
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Australia is originally known for its strong focus on animal welfare, including wildlife protection. Japanese people can learn many things about working with animals from Australians, not just on assistance dogs.
ー Are there any hopes or goals you want to achieve through initiatives with the Japan Service Dog Association?
Currently, there are about 60 dogs that work as service dogs across Japan (as of end of September 2024). But it is thought that there are 15,000 people who are in need of service dogs, so we do not have enough. Service dogs don’t have a long history in Japan, and a reason why the number of service dogs remain low is the lack of social understanding towards them. It takes a lot of time to train service dogs and requires many staff. Expanding the network for breeding is also important.
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With approval from Assistance Dogs International (ADI) – an international organization for service dogs – our association is now able to receive breeding dog candidates from other Australian organisations that are part of the ADI. We believe this is a great result from our engagement with Guide Dogs Queensland.
We hope to continue our engagement with Australia, improve the quality of our training and breeding programs and assist as many people in need as we can by matching our service dogs with them.
Ms Koto MIZUKAMI
General Manager, social welfare corporation Japan Service Dog Association
Ms Mizukami went on exchange to the US during high school when guide dogs where the only support dogs for people with disabilities in Japan. She was inspired when she learnt about service dogs, whose natural canine characteristics are used to provide assistance to people with physical disabilities, and started dreaming about contributing to service dog training. Her dreams turned to resolve after she attended a lecture in her hometown, Osaka, by Mr Yoshitomo KIMURA, who was the user of Cynthia, a service dogs which became a catalyst for the enactment of the Act on Assistance Dogs for Physically Disabled Persons. In 1997 – the year following the lecture – she resigned from her job and moved to Tokyo to join the Service Dogs Association (the predecessor of Japan Service Dogs Association established in 1995) as a volunteer staff member. She started training service dogs while learning on the job and was appointed to manage the Training Section in 2005. She then led the Training Centre before her appointment as General Manager. Other than spreading the use of service dogs, she participates in progressing all programs managed by the Association as well as training future generations of workers at the Association.
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(Interview cooperation)
Social welfare corporation Japan Service Dogs Association
The Association’s vision statement is ‘For a society that is kind and enjoyable for humans and animals’. The Association carries out activities to train and promote the use of service dogs, as well as to train their handlers. Based at ‘Cynthia’s Hill – Service Dogs eneral Training Centre’ in Nagakute-city, Aichi prefecture, the Association matches about three service dogs with people with physical disabilities each year. They also run initiatives like Dog Intervention®, which aims to bring smiles to people through the intervention of dogs.