Our Lady of Akita: The Real Status

1. Is Our Lady of Akita Approved?

Our Lady of Akita carries a diocesan approval and no Roman decree. Bishop John Shojiro Ito of Niigata, the bishop with authority over the convent of the Handmaids of the Eucharist at Yuzawadai in northern Japan, issued a pastoral letter on 22 April 1984 in which he recognised the supernatural character of the events reported there and authorised the veneration of the Holy Mother of Akita throughout his diocese. That letter is the act of record for Akita, and everything a reader can verify about the status of this case comes back to it.

The gap between that sentence and what circulates online is the reason this page exists. Akita is routinely described as approved by the Vatican, approved by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, or personally approved by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. No decree of the Holy See on Akita has ever been published. A bishop's recognition of an apparition in his own diocese is a real act with real force, and it is a different act from a judgment of the Holy See.

Nothing in this page argues against Akita. A diocesan approval is the ordinary way an apparition is approved in the Catholic Church, and most of the famous shrines rest on exactly that kind of act. Lourdes was approved by the Bishop of Tarbes in 1862 and Fatima by the Bishop of Leiria in 1930, both of them local acts by the competent authority. Akita stands in that company. The problem lies with the retelling that upgrades the act, because a claim inflated beyond the record eventually collapses and takes real devotion down with it.

Our companion guide to how the Church judges alleged Marian apparitions puts Akita beside Lourdes, Fatima, Guadalupe, Knock, Kibeho, Champion, Medjugorje and Garabandal, and shows how different the underlying acts are from one another. This page stays on Akita alone.

2. What Bishop Ito Wrote on 22 April 1984

Bishop John Shojiro Ito published his pastoral letter on Akita on 22 April 1984, which that year was Easter Sunday. In it he set out the history of the events at the convent, described the examinations his diocese had carried out, and stated his judgment: that the events at Yuzawadai could not be explained by natural causes and were to be recognised as of supernatural character. He authorised the veneration of the Holy Mother of Akita in the Diocese of Niigata while awaiting any further judgment of the Holy See.

What the letter established

• A determination, by the competent local authority, that the reported phenomena at the convent were supernatural in character.
• Permission for the faithful of the diocese to venerate Our Lady under the title Holy Mother of Akita.
• The lawful continuation of the devotion at the convent chapel, with the ordinary pastoral oversight of the diocese.

What the letter did not establish

• Any obligation on any Catholic anywhere to believe in the apparitions. No approval of any apparition creates such an obligation.
• Any judgment binding outside the Diocese of Niigata. A bishop's authority runs in his own diocese.
• Any endorsement of the interpretations later attached to the messages by writers, publishers and websites.

Source: the pastoral letter of Bishop John Shojiro Ito, Bishop of Niigata, on the events at the convent of the Handmaids of the Eucharist at Yuzawadai, dated 22 April 1984. English translations of the letter circulate widely; readers who want an authoritative text should apply to the Diocese of Niigata.

The road to the letter was slow

Bishop Ito did not act quickly, and the delay is a point in the case's favour rather than against it. The reported events began in 1973. A diocesan commission examined them in the late 1970s and did not produce a positive result. Bishop Ito continued to study the matter, consulted the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in Rome about how to proceed, and only issued his judgment in 1984, eleven years after the first reported message and roughly three years after the last reported weeping of the statue. A bishop who takes eleven years is doing the work the Church asks of him.

3. What a Diocesan Approval Is and What It Carries

A diocesan approval of an apparition is a judgment by the local bishop that the reported events are worthy of belief and that public devotion connected with them may proceed in his diocese. Under the framework in force before 2024, that judgment was traditionally expressed as constat de supernaturalitate, meaning the supernatural character is established. Bishop Ito's letter belongs to that older pattern.

The weight it carries

Approval is a serious act. It means the bishop has examined the doctrinal content, the moral fruits and the conduct of the people involved and found nothing contrary to faith and morals, and it means the faithful may build a devotional life around the site without fear of being led astray. It gives the shrine, the chapel and the title a lawful place in the life of the Church.

The weight it does not carry

Approval creates no article of faith. The Catechism teaches that private revelations do not belong to the deposit of faith, and that their role is to help the faithful live more fully by the definitive Revelation given in Christ (CCC 67). A Catholic may decline to believe in Akita, or in Lourdes, or in Fatima, and remain a Catholic in perfectly good standing. Nobody's salvation turns on an apparition, and the Church has never taught otherwise.

Why the local bishop

The Church places the judgment with the local bishop because he is the one who can actually do it. He can interview the visionary, question the community, read the medical records, watch the devotion over years and see what it produces in the people who take it up. A dicastery in Rome, working from a file, cannot. The Church's practice is that the diocesan bishop judges first and Rome intervenes when a case has spread beyond one diocese or when the local judgment is contested.

Akita never reached that second stage in a published form. The case is a Japanese case, the convent is small, and the bishop who examined it judged it. Readers who want the full six-outcome framework the Church now uses will find it set out in our guide to how alleged Marian apparitions are judged.

4. The "Rome Approved It" Claim

The claim that Rome approved Akita has no published document behind it. It appears in three recurring forms, and each one dissolves when you ask for the act.

Form one: the Congregation issued a definitive judgment

Some accounts state that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith gave a definitive judgment on Akita, usually placed in the late 1980s. No such decree has been published in the Acta Apostolicae Sedis, in a Vatican bulletin, or anywhere else a reader can check. A congregation that judges a case publishes something. The absence of any text after nearly four decades is the answer.

Form two: Cardinal Ratzinger personally approved it

Joseph Ratzinger was prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith from 1981 to 2005 and later Pope Benedict XVI. Reports of private conversations in which he is said to have spoken favourably of Akita circulate in books and interviews. A private remark by a prefect, even if reported accurately by an honest listener, is not an act of his congregation, and second-hand recollections of conversations are among the weakest evidence available about a Church judgment.

Form three: the bishop's letter was made with Roman authority

This form is the closest to the truth and still misstates it. Bishop Ito consulted Rome and then wrote as bishop of his own diocese, explicitly leaving room for any later judgment of the Holy See. Reading his caution as a Roman ratification reverses what the letter says.

Why does the inflation happen? Partly because a Vatican approval sounds stronger and moves more books, and partly because most readers in the English-speaking world have no way to check a Japanese diocesan document and take the loudest claim on offer. The same escalation runs through the whole subject of private revelation, and the same three questions cut through it every time.

This section makes a negative claim, which is stated at the level the evidence supports: no decree of the Holy See on Akita has been published and none is available to be cited. If the Holy See publishes one, the record changes and this page will be wrong. What cannot be maintained is that such a decree exists now and simply cannot be produced.

5. The Convent at Yuzawadai and Sister Agnes Sasagawa

The events of Akita took place at a small convent of the Handmaids of the Eucharist at Yuzawadai, in the hills outside the city of Akita in northern Honshu, within the Diocese of Niigata. The community is contemplative in character and Eucharistic in focus, and it was a modest and obscure house when the reports began. Catholics are a very small minority in Japan, and the setting is worth holding in mind: this is not a country with a mass Marian pilgrimage culture waiting to receive an apparition.

Sister Agnes Katsuko Sasagawa

Sister Agnes Katsuko Sasagawa was born in 1931 and came to Catholicism as an adult, having spent years in poor health, including long periods in hospital. She was deaf when the reported events began. Her deafness is a documented feature of her medical history rather than a devotional detail, and it matters to the account because the messages she reported were, on her testimony, heard interiorly by a woman who could not hear ordinary speech.

Father Teiji Yasuda and the written account

The chaplain to the community, Father Teiji Yasuda, wrote the principal narrative account of the events, which was later translated into English and became the main source for most of what English-speaking readers know about Akita. His book is a participant's account by a priest who was present, and it is valuable for that reason. It is also a devotional narrative written by someone convinced of the events, and readers should weigh it as such.

The biographical details in this section follow the published accounts of the case, principally the narrative of Father Teiji Yasuda and the summary contained in Bishop Ito's 1984 pastoral letter. This page does not attempt to verify medical records it has not seen.

The size of the case

Akita is small. There were no crowds of thousands watching the sun, no visionary children pursued by newspapers, and no village economy built around a shrine. The witnesses to the weeping statue were largely the sisters of the community, the chaplain, and visitors who came in ones and twos, along with a Japanese television crew reported to have recorded one episode. A quiet case is easier to examine than a loud one, and Bishop Ito examined it for eleven years.

6. What Was Reported, 1973 to 1981

The reported events at Akita fall into a sequence running from June 1973 to September 1981. What follows describes what was reported by the sisters and the chaplain and summarised in the bishop's letter. It is an account of claims, and the Church act that bears on them is the diocesan recognition of 1984.

1973: the wound, the light and the messages

In June 1973 Sister Agnes reported a brilliant light from the tabernacle in the convent chapel. Later that month a wound in the form of a cross was reported on the palm of her left hand, accompanied by severe pain. In July a similar wound was reported on the right hand of the wooden statue of Our Lady in the chapel. Three messages are dated to that year: 6 July, 3 August and 13 October 1973.

1975 to 1981: the weeping

From January 1975 the statue in the chapel was reported to weep. The episodes continued at intervals for more than six years, and the accounts record the number at one hundred and one, the last of them in September 1981. The weepings were witnessed by the community and by visitors, and at least one episode was recorded by a Japanese television crew, which is the reason images of the statue with wet cheeks circulate at all.

The figure of one hundred and one weepings, and the dates of the first and last, come from the published accounts of the convent and the chaplain, and are repeated in Bishop Ito's 1984 letter. This page reports the count as the convent reports it and does not independently verify it.

The reported healing of Sister Agnes

Sister Agnes's deafness is reported to have lifted temporarily in 1974 and to have been permanently restored in 1982. Medical certificates are cited in the published accounts. A reader who wants to weigh this element should note that a recovery of hearing has natural pathways in some conditions, that the Church's own criteria treat healings as supporting evidence rather than proof, and that Bishop Ito had access to the medical documentation and the treating physicians when he made his judgment, which a reader forty years later does not.

The statue itself

The statue is a wooden carving of Our Lady standing on a globe with a cross behind her, made in Japan for the community. Its design follows the iconography associated with Our Lady of All Nations, the title connected with the reported apparitions in Amsterdam, which is a separate case with its own separate history in the Diocese of Haarlem-Amsterdam. The visual resemblance says nothing about the status of either case, and the two should not be merged.

7. The Weeping Statue and the Reported Analyses

The weeping of the Akita statue is the element that made the case famous, and it is also the element that proves the least on its own. A statue that appears to weep is a striking sign, and the Church's discernment criteria place striking physical signs below doctrinal content and moral fruits.

What was reported

Witnesses described liquid appearing at the eyes of the wooden statue and running down its face, sometimes for extended periods, along with reports of perspiration on the body of the statue and a fragrance in the chapel. The episodes were not private to Sister Agnes. Members of the community, the chaplain and visitors reported seeing them, and one episode is reported to have been filmed.

The reported laboratory findings

Published accounts of the case state that samples taken from the statue were examined at a Japanese university laboratory and were identified as human blood, sweat and tears, with more than one blood group recorded across different samples. Those findings are reported in the literature on Akita and were among the materials available to the diocese.

The laboratory findings above are reported in the published accounts of the case, principally the narrative of Father Teiji Yasuda, and are attributed there to analyses carried out in Japan in the 1970s. This page has not seen the original laboratory reports and does not assert the results as established fact. Readers who want to weigh them should seek the primary documentation rather than the many websites that repeat the summary.

Why a weeping statue settles nothing by itself

Physical marvels occur in religious contexts that contradict one another, which means the marvel cannot be what establishes the truth of a message. Fraud is possible, and has been demonstrated in other weeping-image cases. Natural explanations, including condensation, capillary action in porous wood and deliberate application, have to be excluded before a supernatural cause is even considered. The Church's criteria for discernment look first at the doctrinal content of what is said, then at the moral fruits over time, then at the conduct and mental health of the people involved, and treat the phenomena as secondary throughout.

Bishop Ito had the phenomena, the laboratory reports, the witnesses, the sisters and eleven years. He weighed them and judged. Our guide to how the Church investigates a claimed miracle sets out the same order of testing in the context of healings, and the order is the point: content first, marvels last.

8. The Three Messages of 1973

Three messages are attributed to Akita, dated 6 July, 3 August and 13 October 1973. They are short. Taken together they run to a few hundred words, and their content is ordinary Catholic ascetical teaching pressed with urgency.

6 July 1973

The first message, in summary, calls for prayer in reparation for the sins of the world and asks Sister Agnes to offer her sufferings for that intention. It speaks of the value of prayer, penance and courageous sacrifices offered to console the Heart of Jesus, and asks for the Rosary to be prayed.

3 August 1973

The second message, in summary, laments indifference and outrage against God, calls for reparation, asks for prayer for the Church and for religious and priests, and speaks of the value of souls who offer themselves as victims for sinners. The theology here is the theology of reparation found across nineteenth and twentieth century Catholic spirituality, most familiarly in devotion to the Sacred Heart.

13 October 1973

The third and longest message, in summary, warns that if people do not repent a grave chastisement will come upon humanity, greater than the flood, and that it will fall on the good along with the wicked. It speaks of the Rosary as the remaining weapon, of division within the Church with priests set against priests and bishops against bishops, of altars and churches being sacked, and of the work of the devil against consecrated souls. It ends on prayer, penance and courageous sacrifices.

The three paragraphs above are summaries in this page's own words of texts circulated in English translation from the Japanese originals recorded at the convent. They are presented as summaries, not as quotations, because the wording of the translations varies. Readers who want the texts should seek a published translation and compare more than one.

What is unremarkable about the content

Nothing in the Akita messages adds to the deposit of faith, and nothing in them contradicts it. Calls to the Rosary, to reparation, to penance and to prayer for priests are ordinary Catholic preaching, and any well-catechised Japanese Catholic in 1973 could have written the first two messages without leaving her chapel. That observation states the Church's own standard rather than an objection to Akita: doctrinal soundness is a necessary condition for approval and never a sufficient one, and a message that agrees with the faith proves nothing by agreeing.

9. How to Read the Chastisement Passage

The chastisement passage in the third Akita message is the part that travels furthest and is handled worst. Read it the way the Church reads prophetic warning, and it is a conditional call to repentance. Read it as a forecast with a schedule, and you have left Catholic teaching behind.

The message names no date

No year, no season, no sequence of events and no countdown appears in the Akita texts. Websites that attach Akita to a timetable are adding the timetable. Christ himself declined to give one, and the refusal is explicit: nobody knows the day or the hour, not the angels, not the Son, only the Father (Mark 13:32). Any reading of Akita that supplies what Christ withheld has contradicted the Gospel in the act of claiming to defend it.

Warning is conditional by nature

Prophetic warning in Scripture is conditional. Jonah announced the overthrow of Nineveh in forty days, the city repented, and the overthrow did not come (Jonah 3:4-10). Jeremiah states the principle directly: if a nation turns from its evil, God relents of the disaster he intended (Jeremiah 18:7-8). A warning of chastisement is an instrument for producing repentance, and it succeeds when the thing it announces does not happen.

The response the message itself asks for

The Akita texts ask for the Rosary, for penance, for reparation and for prayer for priests. Every one of those is available to any Catholic today without reference to any apparition, and the Church recommends all of them already. A person who reads Akita and starts praying a daily Rosary has responded correctly. A person who reads Akita and starts stockpiling has responded to something the message does not say.

A separate body of private prophecy, associated with several nineteenth and twentieth century figures, describes a period of darkness and is often bundled with Akita in the same articles. That material has its own history and its own problems, and our guide to the three days of darkness handles it. The Akita texts do not mention it, and the two subjects should be kept apart.

10. Akita and the Third Secret of Fatima

No act of the Church has ever equated the Akita message with the third secret of Fatima. The claim that a senior Roman official privately said the two were essentially the same rests on reported conversation, and it has been repeated so often that many readers take it for a Vatican position.

What is actually on the record about the third secret

The Holy See published the text of the third part of the secret of Fatima on 26 June 2000, together with a theological commentary by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and an introduction by Archbishop Tarcisio Bertone. The text describes a vision of an angel with a flaming sword, a bishop dressed in white climbing a mountain toward a cross and being killed, along with other bishops, priests, religious and lay people. The published commentary reads it as a call to penance and conversion and as a depiction of the suffering of the Church in the twentieth century.

Why the comparison is loose at best

The Fatima text is a symbolic vision with no spoken message attached. The Akita texts are spoken messages with no vision of that kind. Both call for penance and both speak of suffering coming upon the Church, which is a similarity of theme shared with a great deal of Catholic preaching in every century. Building an identity claim on that overlap requires the reported remark to be doing all the work.

The honest position is available to anyone: both documents are public. The third secret is published on the Holy See's own website, and translations of the Akita messages are easy to find. Read them side by side and form your own judgment about how alike they are, rather than accepting a summary of a conversation nobody can produce a transcript of.

Our guides to the apparitions at Fatima and to the third secret and what was actually published in 2000 cover that case in full, including the disputes about whether anything was withheld. This page takes no position on those disputes and states only that no Church act links Akita to them.

11. Akita Under the 2024 Norms

The 2024 norms do not change the status of Akita. On 17 May 2024 the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith published the Norms for Proceeding in the Discernment of Alleged Supernatural Phenomena, which govern how new cases are handled and do not reopen concluded ones. Akita was judged by the Bishop of Niigata in 1984 under the earlier framework, and that judgment stands as it was made.

What the new norms changed

Under the 2024 norms the Church ordinarily does not declare an alleged apparition to be of supernatural origin. The expected outcome in a favourable case is a nihil obstat, which permits and encourages devotion while declaring nothing about the origin of the phenomena. Six conclusions are available:

• Nihil obstat. Devotion is permitted and may be promoted; no declaration of supernatural origin is made.
• Prae oculis habeatur. Positive elements are present along with elements requiring caution and clarification.
• Curatur. Significant problems are present, though a devotion is already widespread and is managed pastorally rather than suppressed.
• Sub mandato. The phenomenon itself is problematic, and the devotion is placed under the direction of the Holy See or a delegate.
• Prohibetur et obstruitur. The devotion is prohibited and the phenomenon is to be publicly declared unacceptable.
• Declaratio de non supernaturalitate. A declaration that the phenomenon is not supernatural, made on the basis of concrete evidence.

Why Akita looks stronger than a 2024-era case

Bishop Ito's 1984 letter recognised supernatural character, which is a kind of statement the Church now normally declines to make. Comparing Akita with a case that received a nihil obstat after 2024 therefore compares two different kinds of act. The older act says more about the origin of the events. The newer act says more about the safety and fruitfulness of the devotion. Neither ranks above the other on a single scale, and a table that files both under one heading marked "approved" will mislead whoever reads it.

Medjugorje received a nihil obstat on 19 September 2024 in the note titled The Queen of Peace, and our page on what the Medjugorje nihil obstat actually says sets out what that permission does and does not mean. Garabandal received negative determinations from the Diocese of Santander, set out in our page on whether Garabandal is approved. Akita sits with neither of them.

12. How Akita Compares With Other Cases

Comparison is where most readers go wrong, because the acts behind the famous shrines differ in kind and not merely in strength. The table below names the act rather than applying a grade.

Each row names an act, its author and its date so that a reader can look it up. Where a case has no single decree, as at Guadalupe, the row says so rather than inventing one to fill the column.

Full accounts of the comparison cases sit on their own pages: the Kibeho apparitions in Rwanda, Our Lady of Good Help at Champion in Wisconsin, visiting the shrine at Fatima, the pilgrimage to Lourdes and the basilica of Guadalupe.

13. What Is at Yuzawadai Today

What stands at Yuzawadai is a convent chapel with a wooden statue in it, in the hills outside Akita city, within the Diocese of Niigata. There is no basilica, no esplanade and no pilgrimage town. The scale of the place surprises people who arrive expecting something like Lourdes.

The chapel holds the statue at the centre of the case, and visitors come to pray before it. The community continues its life of prayer, and the ordinary sacramental life of the Church proceeds there as in any Catholic chapel: Mass, confession, silence. Pilgrims have come over the decades from within Japan and from abroad, and the site has remained a small contemplative house rather than a developed shrine complex.

This page deliberately gives no opening hours, no travel costs, no transport instructions and no operator details. Those change without notice, they cannot be verified from here, and a page that builds on them starts rotting the week it ships. Anyone planning a visit should write to the convent or to the Diocese of Niigata and take the answer from them.

If travel to northern Japan is out of reach, the devotion travels perfectly well. Marian prayer needs no aeroplane, and our guide to praying a pilgrimage from home sets out how to keep the shape of a pilgrimage in a room you already sit in.

14. Can a Catholic Venerate Our Lady of Akita?

A Catholic may venerate Our Lady under the title Holy Mother of Akita. The devotion is authorised in the Diocese of Niigata by the bishop's own act, and Marian devotion in general requires no apparition to justify it anywhere in the Church. Honouring the Mother of God is Catholic practice with or without Akita.

What is permitted

• Praying before the statue at the convent chapel, and praying the devotion at home.
• Believing that the events at Akita happened as reported, since the competent bishop judged them to be of supernatural character.
• Taking up what the messages ask for: the Rosary, penance, reparation, prayer for priests and for the Church.
• Telling other people about the case accurately, naming Bishop Ito and the date of his letter.

What is not honest

• Describing Akita as approved by the Vatican, by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, or by Cardinal Ratzinger personally, when no such document has been published.
• Attaching a date, a countdown or a sequence of world events to the chastisement passage, when the text supplies none and the Gospel forbids the exercise.
• Telling other Catholics they are obliged to believe in Akita, or treating their indifference to it as a defect of faith.
• Raising money on any of the above.

The objection worth answering

Some readers will ask whether a diocesan approval is worth anything if Rome has said nothing. The answer is that a diocesan approval is the normal and sufficient form of approval for an apparition in the Catholic Church, and Lourdes and Fatima began exactly there. Rome's later attention to those shrines followed the growth of the devotion rather than creating its legitimacy. Akita's approval is complete for what it is, and describing it accurately makes it stronger rather than weaker, because an accurate claim survives being checked.

15. How to Test Any Private Revelation

Akita is one case, and the reader who came here will meet another next month. The criteria below are the Church's own, and they work as well on a video circulating this week as on a Japanese convent in 1973.

Ask who the competent authority is and what it published

Every alleged apparition sits in a diocese, and that diocese has a bishop. The first question is always what he published and when. At Akita the answer is precise: Bishop John Shojiro Ito, pastoral letter, 22 April 1984. When a source cannot name a document and a date, it does not know the status, and vague appeals to Rome or to unnamed cardinals are the standard substitute for an act.

Check the doctrinal content before the phenomena

Content contrary to the faith settles a case negatively at once. Content in agreement with the faith proves nothing on its own, because agreement is easy to produce. Read the message first, and treat the tears, the lights and the wounds as secondary evidence, which is how the Church treats them.

Watch for a supplied timetable

Predictions with dates, sequences and countdowns contradict Mark 13:32 in structure even when they avoid naming a year. The Akita texts supply no timetable. Websites that hand you one have added it, and a revelation that offers you the schedule the Son declined to give is asking to be trusted over the Gospel.

Watch the money and the obedience

Look at who is funded by the devotion and how they respond to authority. Genuine devotion accepts a bishop's judgment, including a negative one, and states his act accurately when it is positive. A movement that inflates a diocesan letter into a Vatican decree has told you that the record was insufficient for its purposes.

Remember what private revelation is for

The Catechism teaches that private revelations do not belong to the deposit of faith and that their role is to help the faithful live more fully by the definitive Revelation given in Christ (CCC 67). Even an approved apparition adds nothing to the faith. Our guide to testing claimed prophecy applies the same criteria to the wider field of prophetic claims.

16. What the Church Asks of You Instead

The Church asks for repentance, the sacraments, prayer and charity, and it asks for them now. That is the whole content of readiness, and the Akita messages ask for the same things in fewer words. A person who came to this page worried about a chastisement has the entire remedy available before the week is out.

Christ's instruction after the Olivet Discourse is to stay awake, because the hour is unknown (Mark 13:33-37). Staying awake means confession when you need it, Sunday Mass and the Eucharist, the Rosary the Akita messages press, and honest dealing with the people in your house. None of it is glamorous, none of it generates newsletters, and it is what the Church has asked of every generation since the Apostles.

If the eschatology is what drew you here, our guide to what the Catholic Church actually teaches about the end times is the hub for it, with the Second Coming and the Final Judgment taking the individual doctrines. None of those pages sets a date, because the Gospel does not.

17. Related Guides

These pages carry the subjects this one touches. The apparition guide holds the full comparison of statuses, and the Fatima pages handle the case Akita is most often linked to.