Nihon Ken Hozonkai Standard

Nihon Ken Hozonkai Standard for the six native Japanese breeds

This translation was made by Susan Houser and Shigekazu Kuribayashi in 1987 for the Shiba Ken Club. It was updated in 1993 for the Shiba Journal by Mitsuko Williams to include corrections and changes made for the 1992 Nippo revision. Some numbers and letters have also been changed to bullets to make this document more HTML friendly.

click here to see the 1935 Standard

This standard is the complete Nihon Ken Hozonkai Standard for the six native Japanese breeds.

The standard includes four sections:

The Japanese Dog Standard - an outline for all the Japanese dogs.
Resolutions Concerning Judging (was Diagrams of the Names of Every Part of the Japanese Dog, but could not put these diagrams on Internet)
Judging Resolutions Concerning the Japanese Dog Standard - presents variety-specific color, teeth limitations, etc. for the use of judges in the ring.
Judge’s Regulations - presents the training procedure and guidelines for the behavior of judges.

Section one, The Japanese Dog Standard (the basic standard) was used by JKC to write their Shiba standard and JKC provided their standard to FCI for international use. This has led to most of the controversy about the breed that exists in the west today. The complete standard, titled Resolutions Concerning The Japanese Dog Standard and Judges, is written in the traditional Japanese style, from the general to the specific (just as in Japan, the last name appears before the first name and the city before the street). The basic standard lists the coat colors found in all of the native breeds, from the Akita, through the middle sized dogs, down to the Shiba. This is where we find the undesirable colors of white and black sesame listed. Section three, the Judging Resolutions, which follow the diagrams, give specific details as to what colors are correct, how many missing teeth are acceptable, and details of type, for each breed that do not appear in the basic standard. Here we find that the only acceptable colors for the Shiba are red, red sesame and black and tan. We also can see just how critical dentition is to Japanese breeders.

Nippo considers the Nihon Ken (the Japanese Dog) to be one breed with several varieties. When you study the translation of this standard, keep in mind that the Shiba is referred to as the small-sized dog, the Akita as the large sized dog, and the medium sized dog refers to the Kishu, Shikoku, Kai, etc. Comments noted as [Trans note:] that appear in brackets have been added by the translators as clarification for readers not familiar with the Nihon Ken breeds or the Japanese style of writing.

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