Muzzle the dog, then you can see what she will do without risking the lives of the cats. If she is not treating the cats with respect you will need to start a program of desensitization/counter-conditioning with the dog. The idea is this: now, the dog sees cats and thinks "cats=chase, bite, eat, whatever", you want to train her to think "cats=treats" first and then later "acting civilized with cats=treats". This chasing behavior is VERY self-reinforcing for a dog and you need to provide something to convince her it would be MORE fun to leave the cats alone. So confine the cats where they will be safe (crate) but the dog can see them easily, and begin training. Use of a clicker will help. The clicker is an event marker to show the dog this is the moment you were doing something right. It MUST be "charged" first, ie: click and treat 100 times so the dog knows click means a treat will be forth coming. If the dog knows ANY obedience at all, you can start using the clicker to mark the instant of sit, down, or whatever behavior. Anyway, when the clicker is charged then everytime the dog looks at the cats and then looks back at you, click praise and treat. Starting with this as the minimum requirement is good, although you can try to get the dog to do something obedient (sit or down) while this is going on to remind her that you are training and to keep her from trying to get at the cats. If she really wont stop attacking the cage, tie her up a few feet away, and she will eventually settle down and this is when you begin training. She will begin to look at you more often as she gets it that focusing on you when cats are around gets her treats. MAKE SURE TO USE VERY HIGH VALUE TREATS, SOMETHING THE DOG LOVES AND DOES NOT GET OFTEN, IN SMALL AMOUNTS SO YOU CAN DO IT A WHOLE LOT WITHOUT FILLING HER UP. From here you work up gradually to her being closer to the cats, to the cats being more active, to her being completely focused on you and staying away from them, and finally to the cats out of the cage (might want to put the muzzle back on for this step to be safe at first). This WILL take time, but then again you knew having a dog (especially a young one, especially a working breed, ESPECIALLY an akita) was a lot of work, right? If you do not have the time to do this, then you should not keep the dog, as she will prbably end up killing the cats without this kind of intervention and it is not fair to ask the cats to live in fear 24/7, even if you know she will not hurt the cats they do not know that. Make sure to keep the animals seperated until this training is complete when you are not working with them so the dog NEVER has a chance to practice this behavior while you are not there. Actually once you start to get the hang of it and as long as you are patient and NEVER push the dog beyond what she can do at any point in time, it is VERY rewarding and fun to see their mindss working as they puzzle out how to get the food. You don't want to use any commands here, first of all because she may have had some commands lose their meaning by not enough reinforcement and improper useage, so that stay does not mean stay anymore, but instead means get up and run away. Once you have the behavior working reliably, THEN add the command word(s) like "off" or "easy". Like learning another language, first you identify something (like seeing a picture of an orange, or the word), then you learn how to say it in the other language (by hearing or seeing "naranja", which means orange in Spanish. You don't learn what the word means without first knowing what it will be signifying.
For more info see books by Karen Pryor, Jean Donaldson, Patricia McConnell on dogwise.com
PS I have three cats, one akita, one malamute, and one chow chow, all breeds that are supposed to be cat-killers. Although the akita and Mal lived with cats from puppyhood, the chow was 7 and very prey-driven when I adopted him, and the program I am describing worked for him. He was also very hyper, untrained, fear aggressive (so even if I had wanted to I couldn't use physical corrections because he would have been in fear for his life and tried to bite me). The cats still occasionally get softly mouthed by the dogs, but they will get off on command and no dog has ever hurt a cat even a little (in fact it is usually the other way around). Just so you know that I know what I am talking about.
