Acts of Cultural Vandalism - Objects Have Soul

Ikea "lamp" ad (2002)

The subject of this post was first prompted by this scene from the manga Nura: Rise of the Yokai Clan.

Pages 122-9 of volume 16 of Nura: Rise of the Yokai Clan

(first published by Shueisha Inc. in May 2011, 

translated to English and printed by Viz Media, LLC in August 2013)

(As far as I know, this scene has never been animated. If I'm wrong, please tell me in the comments.) 

This scene involves a very interesting idea from the supernatural.... the Tsukumogami. A tsukumogami is a type of Japanese Yokai that only comes into being and self-aware when a manmade object becomes 100 years old. Depending on the treatment the object gets during their pre-Yokai life, it can be a nice Yoaki (which can be the case for most dolls that belonged to girls who didn't have the bad luck of having a brother who had pleasure torturing them) or an evil Yokai (which can be the case for most cars made by British Leyland).

That well known scene from the "Gourmet Night" episode of Fawlty Towers (1975)

That Austin 1100 Countryman would definitely become an evil tsukumogami if Basil continues battering that poor defenceless thing. It's not his fault his ignition system wasn't assembled at Toyota quality standards. (Before you brand me for taking a shot at Toyota for its recall saga a few years ago, I like to point out that (at the time of writing) I drive an Aygo, a car that wasn't affected by the recall at all :-).)

Wait a minute! I just remembered. Remember that scene from Treehouse of Horror XVIII where Groundskeeper Willie beats up his tractor....

Can't find clip.

Now that is an evil tsukumogami.

The tsukumogami are a notable staple in Japanese popular culture, especially manga that feature supernatural themes, like Nura: Rise of the Yokai Clan (as seen at the start of this entry). In the scene pictured Kiyotsugu (head of the Kiyojūji Paranormal Investigation Squad and student council president of Ukiyoe Middle School of Ukiyoe Town, Tokyo) explains the concept of the tsukumogami while he leads the KPIS in a research trip in Nishikigoi Flea Market. One of their crew is Tsurara Oikawa (a Yuki Onna or "snow woman"). She was there for a different reason. In fact, the KPIS just showed up and spotted her there a page earlier. I won't say why she was there, as it'll take forever and reveal too much of the plot of the manga, but I will say that the the black-haired male Yokai who was teasing Tsurara on page one was Gozumaru. While there Tsurara noticed on sale some old small glass bowls used to serve iced desserts. Liking one dating from the Taishō period (Japan's equivalent to the roaring 1920s) she buys it and soon after purchasing it she makes herself some shaved ice. While enjoying her selfmade cold snack, the glass dish talked and turned into a little female figure - a tsukumogami. With an association of ice between them, the little lass who began her life as a fancy "penny lick" (that was the term those glass serving dishes had in the West and its not a double entendre) called her "master." This made Tsurara think.  She decided to buy all the "penny licks" the stall had and awakened the tsukumogami they became. She was down before, but now she has an entire army of mini Yokai behind her.

While writing this description of the scene, I pondered about all the lonely children, teens and adults out there that are lonely and only have a collection of dolls, plush toys, and figurines as company. Their probably reading this (or the manga I referenced) and now wishing that their "friends" could actually come to life. Sadly, they can't. Objects have to be over 100years old to become tsukumogami, so unless your a serious plangonologist or arctophilist who has managed to acquire figures of the right vintage, it ain't going to happen.

I know, the idea of tsukumogami seem to be just an Asian one, but if you think about it the idea that inanimate objects have souls is a universal one.

Think about it. Think of Toy Story. Think of the people who worship objects, like religious relics or Apple products (imagine that broken iPhone scene from The Cleveland Show (from this episode)). Think about those stories about people who have developed a love interest with (and married) a building.

In fact, think of what came to my mind while I read that scene......

I Know You Got Soul - Machines with That Certain Something 

by Jeremy Clarkson (2005 [pictured 2006 Penguin paperback edition])

Yes, Jeremy Clarkson believes that some machines have a soul. I Know You Got Soul is his praise for over 20 machines from around the world and history including Concorde, the Millenium Falcon, the Hoover Dam, the Arthur satellite dish in Goonhilly, the AK47 assault rifle, the battleship Yamato and (been the patriotic Brit he is) the Supermarine Spitfire. It's probably the only book written by Clarkson that a Guardian reader can read without vomiting (with rage).

Looking through it, the machines he has chosen to cover in this book are machines that do have... what you might call ... charisma. Some "essence" that makes them stand out from the others. It can be easily explained for individual machines, but its hard to sum up generally.

For example, take cars.... (Yes, we're steering towards Top Gear territory.)

Compare the Austin John Cleese beat up earlier with a Trabant. Two cars that (looking at the front) look about the same to the non-car person.

Note: The picture of the Trabant was taken by me inside
Glasgow's Transport Museum years before it moved to the Clyde for its river views. The Austin pic is a random one I found online.


Nearly uncanny isn't it. But which is more attractive? I give you some time to think....

Thought about it? Which one do you like most? 

Based on prejudice against plastics and two-stroke engines (despite it having a better mileage) the Austin will win. The Trabant is not a well-loved car (except to people nostalgic about the the Cold War and the time Germany was split into two countries). They were ugly machines that they were forced to have due to lack of choice and, when the Wall came down, most former East-Germans abandoned them for something better.

And speaking of two-stroke engines and Trabants, here's an interesting Channel 4 documentary from 1997 about them presented by Robbie Coltrane. In it, he is forced by the producer to take out the engine in a Trabant to demonstrate its ease of maintenance. He claims to have done it in less than 23 minutes, but how can we be sure? 

"The 2 Stroke Engine" Coltrane's Planes and Automobiles (1997)

End entertaining tangent.

The Austin, on the other hand, was quite a popular car at its time - the best-selling in Britain. 2.1million Austin 1100s (and its other incarnations made by BL) were sold from 1962-74. Why? Apart from advanced features, like front disc brakes and hydrolastic suspension, or the spacious interior that was about the same in volume compared to the larger Ford Cortina, the Austin looks.... cute. That isn't a surprise, considering that it was designed by the same man who bought the world the cute little Mini. Although the Trabant has a cute face on the front similar to the Austin, it is hindered by the lack of chrome (humans like shiny things).

Why is this relevant to the idea of objects having souls, you ask? Well think about it. In the world of cars some models have an iconic status and these cars are well looked after by their respected owners clubs. As a result, a huge number of these "iconic" cars have survived and are well cherished. But this number is tiny compared to the many more "unloved" models that are slowly dying out every year due to rust and lack of love.

For every Porsche with a careful owner that is safe in a garage they are thousands of Protons with owners of a no-care attitude left out in the rain.

This point hit me recently when I encountered this slideshow from MSN.com entitled 100 popular cars vanishing from UK roads. The last slide was a shock for me, as I have a thing for machines. According to this webpage, the last surviving SEAT Málaga on British roads "died" in 2017. Looking at How Many Left?, they were once hundreds of Malagas in 2001. One of the many millions or so everyday cars made in the 1980s and were still going by the start of this century. 

Although the SEAT Malaga isn't (or should I say "wasn't") a particularly special car, the fact that no example of it exists anymore should be a pain in the heart. Especially for the many people SEAT employed in the 1980s to design it, build its prototype, tool its factory, manufacture it, test it, and then finally sale it. The physical proof of all their work and ingenuity ... no more.

If the SEAT Malaga had been a sports car or a car that defined a time and place in history, its story will have been different. But this story is not unique to cars. It can happen to any human-made object. Clothing, gadgets, furniture, buildings, books, records, they are all subject to the same cultural forces that made the SEAT Malaga disappear, preventing it from becoming a tsukumogami. 

The concept of the tsukumogami came about in a time when very few people had the money to buy new things for the sake of it. Most people owned things that were hand down generations and were only replaced when they finally broke beyond repair.

Then William Painter invented the disposable crown bottle cap and inspired a Mr King Gillette to create his safety razor, featuring cheap replicable blades made to only last a few shaves. Soon manufacturers realized that they could get away with selling people the same product every few years or so with little innovation by just changing its styling. Then they worked out ways to force us to buy the next model (even though we were not that fashion-conscious) by engineering when it'll finally break ... and they won't be able to fix it because only the manufacturers had the right tools and had the monopoly on spare parts, making repairs more expensive than they should. 

I know some like this state of affairs on the grounds of providing employment and guaranteeing that we all get the latest innovations as soon as they become possible to make, but I personally hate it. Not because of the very obvious environmental problems it causes, but also because I hate when an object that once took someone(s) hours or even years to make gets thrown away just because no one wants it or because a bit broke off it. I prefer it (if possible) if that object able to find another owner than buried under a pile of soiled nappies in a landfill site. But that's the world we find ourselves it.

"We have this idea that stuff from the past lasted a long time. But that is because we can only see the stuff that has lasted a long time. We forget about all the stuff we threw away because it was rubbish.  …. Most of us only really know what happened because of what we can see, therefore Medieval England must have been full of cathedrals. It must have been amazing." - James May, The Reassembler (2017)

What is the oldest object you own? I bet most of you own nothing made before the 1980s. And fewer own something made before the 1960s. And fewer still before World War II. So very few of us will have the chance (if it was possible) to experience seeing an object become a tsukumogami. What to know my answer? Its this.....

a 1920s portable typewriter I bought on eBay

So, we have established that thanks to fashion, certain business practises, education, nostalgia, accident and a general sense of an object's time of usefulness as technology changes, the chances of an object made since 1900 becoming a tsukumogami is very slim. Technically, right now (2018) any object made before or during World War I should be now a tsukumogami. Apart form museum pieces, they are objects over a century old that are in the caring hands of the friends and family of their original owners. You may occasionally see them in one of those antique restoration TV shows. So we can assume that most of them will become good tsukumogami. The ones that would have become evil tsukumogamis may have been destroyed by time or carelessness a long time ago.

When I first encountered the tsukumogami back when I read Nura: Rise of the Yokai Clan a few years ago the idea of an object becoming a living being after a certain amount of time intrigued me. But the problem I had picturing it was the 100 year rule. Because its now 2018 the objects that will become tsukumogami are objects from a time period way different from the present. I mean, how many of us have seen (for real) a Hammond Typewriter or a phonograph cylinder? If tsukumogami were real, I have to wait a very long time for objects I'm very familiar with to become them. We have to wait until 2081 for DeLoreans and the first IBM PCs to become them. I bet the artists in Japan who created the many brush strokes depicting tsukumogami would not have imagined that centuries later tsukumogami would be able to perform up to a million instructions per second and travel from 0-60mph in 8.8seconds in a stainless steel shell.

And another thing. If tsukumogami existed, it would make TV shows about antiques look like dramas about human trafficking. And if it did you may think twice before sending your old PC to the recycling centre where it could end up been shipped to the third world to be "recycled."