The Japanese word tsukumogami (付喪神) refers to a concept that has no direct equivalent in any other folk tradition we have surveyed. The literal translation is something like “tool-kami” or “object-spirit.” The concept: any object that has been used, cared for, and loved for one hundred years acquires a spirit of its own.

It is a small idea with enormous consequences.

The mechanics

Tsukumogami are a category of yōkai — the broad Japanese class of supernatural beings — but they are distinct from ghosts, gods, or demons. They are not the spirits of dead people. They are not nature spirits. They are objects that have crossed a threshold of love and continuity into a kind of consciousness.

The folk tradition distinguishes several types:

• Karakasa-obake — an old umbrella that has come alive, hopping on one leg.
• Bake-zōri — old straw sandals.
• Kameosa — an old sake jar that pours endlessly for those it likes.
• Boroboroton — an old futon, mistreated, that wraps around its owner in revenge.

The oldest documented references are in the Tsukumogami Emaki (a picture-scroll of c. 1500), but the underlying concept is much older and is bound up with the broader animist tradition of Shintō, in which the natural world is full of small consciousnesses.

Why this concept is kind

Most folk traditions instruct children to be careful with objects because they are valuable. The tsukumogami tradition instructs children to be careful with objects because they may, eventually, wake up. The umbrella you have used for fifty years has been listening. The teacup your grandmother used has, in some sense, been there with her, and may someday speak for her.

This produces a different relationship to material things than the Western tradition produces. A used object in Japanese folk tradition is not merely worn — it is known. The repaired, the patched, the inherited carry a quiet seriousness that brand-new objects don’t.

The contemporary expression of this — the way an older Japanese craftsperson treats a fifty-year-old plane or chisel, or the kintsugi tradition of repairing broken pottery with gold seams that highlight rather than hide the break — is downstream of the tsukumogami concept. The object is becoming someone.

For bedtime reading

There are several lovely children’s books that take tsukumogami as their subject. The Umbrella Festival (うらおもて, illustrated by Yumi Heo, 2014) is the most accessible. For older children, the picture book Yokai Boy and the Strange Library (Shaun Tan’s lesser-known collaboration with Nahoko Uehashi, 2019, available in English) plays delicately with the concept.

For families: the simplest entry is to choose one object in your child’s life — a worn stuffed animal, a small toy that has been with them since infancy — and tell them that in Japan, people believe that if they love an object for a long enough time, the object eventually wakes up and remembers them. Watch what your child does with this information.

In our experience, children take this idea with complete seriousness. And we have no good argument against it.

— Sources: Reider, N.T., Japanese Demon Lore, Utah State University Press, 2010; the original Tsukumogami Emaki scroll is held at the Sōfukuji temple, Gifu prefecture, photographic reproduction in Kobayashi, T., Yōkai no Kaiga, 1983.