page_title: Tsukumogami
section_title: History and etymology
hierarchical_section_title: Tsukumogami / History and etymology
caption_attribution_description: English: woodblock print: A New Collection of Monsters (Shinpan bakemono zukushi) [新板化物つくし]
context_page_description: In Japanese folklore, tsukumogami are tools that have acquired a kami or spirit. According to an annotated version of The Tales of Ise titled Ise Monogatari Shō, there is a theory originally from the Onmyōki that foxes and tanuki, among other beings, that have lived for at a hundred years and changed forms are considered tsukumogami. In modern times, the term can also be written 九十九神, to emphasize the agedness.
  According to Komatsu Kazuhiko, the idea of a tsukumogami or a yōkai of tools spread mostly in the Japanese Middle Ages and declined in more recent generations. Komatsu infers that despite the depictions in Bakumatsu period ukiyo-e art leading to a resurfacing of the idea, these were all produced in an era cut off from any actual belief in the idea of tsukumogami.
  Because the term has been applied to several different concepts in Japanese folklore, there remains some confusion as to what the term actually means. Today, the term is generally understood to be applied to virtually any object "that has reached its 100th birthday and thus become alive and self-aware", though this definition is not without controversy.
context_section_description: The kanji representation of 付喪神 for "tsukumogami" comes from a Tenpō period otogizōshi, an emakimono called the Tsukumogami Emaki. According to this emaki, a tool, after the passage of 100 years, would obtain a spirit (kami or -gami as a suffix), with this change resulting in a tsukumogami. This emaki also had a caption mentioning that "tsukumo" could also be written as 九十九 (meaning "ninety-nine", or more literally, "nine tens [九十] and nine [九]") referring to "one year less than a full hundred." This led to the interpretation that this meaning came from "tsukumo hair" or つくも髪, which is also pronounced tsukumogami since the hair kanji (髪) is a homophone of the spirit kami/-gami. This version of the word appeared in a waka poem in The Tales of Ise, section 63, referring to an old woman's white hair, which is why tsukumo means "a long time (ninety-nine years)."
  Outside of these uses, the word "tsukumogami" does not appear anywhere in extant literature of the time, and so historical usage of the term itself has not been handed down in detail. The concept, however, does appear elsewhere. In collections such as the Konjaku Monogatarishū, there are tales that could be seen to be about objects having a spirit, and in the emakimono Bakemono Zōshi, there are tales of a chōshi (a sake serving-pot), a scarecrow, and other objects turning into monsters, but the word "tsukumogami" itself does not appear.
  The Tsukumogami Emaki describes how an object would become occupied by a spirit after one hundred years, so people would throw out old objects before they became a hundred years old, which was called the "susu-harai" (煤払い). By doing this, they prevented objects from becoming tsukumogami, but according to the captions of this emaki, it's written that ones that are "a year from one hundred," in other words, objects that are "tsukumo" (ninety-nine) years old would become angered and become a yōkai by some means other than the mere passage of time, and then cause a ruckus.
  In the first place, the idea of becoming a yōkai at one-hundred or ninety-nine years old does not need to be taken literally. Those numbers can represent the idea that humans, plants, animals, or even tools would acquire a spiritual nature once they become significantly old, and thereby gain the power to change themselves. Writing tsukumo as 九十九 ("ninety-nine") is not simply referring to a number, since the word was used since old times to loosely mean "many." The yōkai that are depicted are not ones that gained the power to change themselves as a result of being used for a long time, but rather ones that were thrown away right before it, becoming a yōkai through some different means.
caption: Woodblock print, A New Collection of Monsters 新板化物つくし, 1860
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