By genome-wide breed distance on the Sniff atlas (Euclidean distance on the top 10 principal components of per-breed minor-allele-frequency PCA), the five nearest breeds to the Akita are Chinese Rural Dog (distance 7.428), Chow Chow (9.225), Chinese Shar Pei (10.452), Qingchuan Hound (10.762), and Guangxi Hound (11.453).
The Akita side of that comparison is based on 22 CanVAS dogs. Distances are relative within this PCA space; smaller means genetically closer among the breeds in the distance matrix.
These are computational genetic neighbors, not a clinical or registration claim. The structured neighbors JSON also reports name-embedding "editorial" neighbors that can fully diverge from the genetic top five; when the question is genetic relatedness, prefer the PCA list and the Akita breed page.