Tsukumogami

[4] 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.

[6][7] 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",[8] though this definition is not without controversy.

Outside of these uses, the word tsukumogami is not attested in the surviving literature of the time, and so the historical usage of the term itself has not been handed down in detail.

there are tales of a chōshi (a saké serving-pot), a scarecrow, and other inanimate objects turning into monsters, but the word tsukumogami itself does not appear.

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.

Even in emakimono that came before the Tsukumogami Emaki, paintings of yōkai based on tools can be confirmed, and in the Tsuchigumo Zōshi, there were depictions of gotoku (trivets) with heads, stamp mills with the body of a snake and two human arms attached to it, and a tsunodarai (four-handled basin) with a face and growing teeth, among others.

[18] Understood by many Western scholars,[7] tsukumogami was a concept popular in Japanese folklore as far back as the tenth century,[19] used in the spread of Shingon Buddhism.

[19] According to Elison and Smith (1987), Tsukumogami was the name of an animated tea caddy that Matsunaga Hisahide used to bargain for peace with Oda Nobunaga.

[19]By the twentieth century the Tsukumogami had entered into Japanese popular culture to such an extent that the Buddhist teachings had been "completely lost to most outsiders,"[22] leaving critics to comment that, by and large, the Tsukumogami were harmless [citation needed] and at most tended to play occasional pranks,[citation needed] they did have the capacity for anger and would band together to take revenge upon those who were wasteful or threw them away thoughtlessly – compare mottainai.