Yesterday, I went up to Edinburgh for the day to meet up with fellow PaperTigers blogger Sally Ito and her children, who are on holiday in Scotland at the moment. Despite the pretty miserable weather, we had a busy, fun-packed day.

Of course, following Sally’s post about Greyfriars Bobby last month, we had to visit the famous churchyard – here we are by the famous statue!

On the way there, we passed The Elephant House, now famous for being the place where J.K.Rowling wrote Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone – and at the children’s behest we returned there later, which proved to be an absolute treat for an elephant-lover like me, as it is chock-a-block full of elephants from floor to ceiling – here we are, with elephant-shaped shortbread!

In between we visited the Camera Obscura and World of Illusions - here we all are in the thermal-imaging chamber… In the shop afterwards I found some beautiful Hiroshige pictures to make into Tatebanko, “the forgotten Japanese paper diarama”: they were certainly new to me but I’ve found this very interesting post about Tatebanko by artist Judith Hoffman (and what amazing metal books she creates!).

I also found a fantastic book for young (and old! – Older Brother, Younger Brother and my husband all loved it!) children: Gallop! by Rufus Butler Seder (Workman Publishing, 2007) – a “Scanimation Picture Book”. Without the moving images, this would be a charming board book for the very young, with interactive verse and good use of color and onomatopoeia:

Can you flutter like a butterfy?
Flittery-float-float!
Can you swim like a turtle?
Glippety-gloap-gloap

…and there’s a delightful twist to the poem at the end. But on top of all that, there are the truly wonderful moving images, which, magically, only work if you move the pages. Watch Seder talking about his Scanimation process on this video - fascinating! In the publication details at the front of the book, Seder “acknowledges some illustrations in this book are based on the motion photography pioneered by Eadweard Muybridge” – in fact, the cover itself pays homage to Muybridge’s The Horse in Motion. So there’s a good excuse, if one is needed, for parents to enjoy the book too! Another book, Swing!, came out last year too – it’s next on my wish-list…

So all in all, we had a great day and have clocked up another real-life meeting among the PaperTigers Team!

Right now, my daughter is in a phase of her childhood where she wants a dog.  We haven’t gotten one yet, but we have started reading stories about dogs.  We began with two classic stories from very different parts of the world: Japan and Scotland.  One story is about Hachiko, a Japanese Akita-ken, who faithfully waited for his professor-master at the Shibuya railway station in Tokyo in the early part of the century even after his master died at work and failed to come home on his usual train. The other story is about Bobby, a Skye terrier who abided by his police-man master’s grave in Greyfriars Kirkyard in Edinburgh, Scotland for fourteen years.  Both dogs have been immortalized in books and films.

For children’s books on Hachiko, there is Hachiko Waits by Leslea Newman (illus. by Machiyo Kodaira), published in 2004 and Hachiko:The True Story of a Loyal Dog by Pamela Turner (illus. by Yan Nascimbene) also published the same year.  An Americanized movie version of the story is currently in the making called Hachiko: A Dog’s Story.   Bobby was made famous by Eleanor Atkinson‘s 1912 book Greyfriars Bobby and it is on the basis of this book that movies were made about Bobby — namely Disney’s 1961 Greyfriars Bobby and the more recent 2006 The Adventures of Greyfriars Bobby.  A more recent retelling of the story in book form is Ruth Brown‘s The Ghost of Greyfriars Bobby.

In addition to the books and movies, are monuments to the dogs themselves.  In Tokyo, Hachiko’s statue is a prime meeting spot at busy Shibuya Station (I’ve met many a friend there) and Bobby’s statue is in front of Greyfriars Bobby Pub not far from Greyfriars Kirkyard in Edinburgh.  If in your travels, you ever get a chance to go to these cities, you might want to visit these monuments to two very remarkable and loyal dogs.