Tsukumogami are beings that arise when ordinary objects gain a spirit of their own. Their moral message? Treat your possessions well.

Halloween is on its way. Are you scared yet?

The chances are: no. In some corners of western culture, it’s still taken very seriously. Witness the rise of light shows or ‘Light Parties’, organised by Christian churches that worry about our annual indulgence of ghosts, the undead and the occult. Better, they argue, to celebrate illumination over darkness.

The other place you might find Halloween receiving considered attention is in the policing of costumes. There’s usually an outcry somewhere. It might be cultural appropriation, from geisha girl get-up to Mexican Day of the Dead face-paint. Or else anger at the fetishising of mental illness, with costumes inspired by films such as *The Texas Chainsaw Massacre *or Friday the 13th.

In general though, as someone who has spent years shepherding my children around our neighbourhood for trick-or-treating, Halloween is a mix of the just very slightly spooky – grey cobwebs and flickering pumpkin-lanterns – and the unremittingly dull and repetitive.

Japan, I think, does better justice to what Halloween is supposed to be about. And it does it in three ways.

First, Halloween itself has become, in the last couple of decades, a cosplay extravaganza. Places like Shibuya in central Tokyo, are famous for mass-gatherings of the weirdly and wonderfully attired. Authorities of late have become worried about public drinking in places like Shibuya and have begun to clamp down. The party will no doubt go elsewhere.

Second, Japan has its actual day of the dead not in October but in July or August, depending on which part of the country you’re in.The festival of Obon is when the spirits of people’s deceased relatives are believed to return to visit them. These spirits are greeted, when they arrive, neither with panicked screaming nor sugar-heavy treats. Instead, the living gather at graveyards to clean the area, drink together and have fun. Families may hang lanterns at home or light fires, to guide the spirits back from the other world.

One of the best-loved parts of the festivities features ‘Bon Odori’ dancing. Originally another means of welcoming the dead, the music and dancing varies from region to region across Japan. The costumes and routines make for quite the spectacle – as you’d expect, it’s become a big thing on Instagram.

I found my first Obon a little strange: the idea of drinking alcohol in a graveyard, while laughing and letting off fireworks, seemed more the kind of thing that rebellious teenagers might do. But I came to love the idea that welcoming deceased relatives, however people understand that – real encounter, remembrance, simple celebration – could be something joyful rather than sad and sombre.

This idea, that our approach to the very biggest questions – life, death, the hereafter – can and perhaps should include a sense of playfulness, extends to the third way in which Japan deals with the themes we associate with Halloween. I’m thinking about yōkai, or ‘monsters’ – but a very particular kind of yōkai, known as tsukumogami.

Tsukumogami are beings that arise when ordinary objects reach a certain age and gain a spirit of their own. They come alive, become self-aware. Sometimes it takes 100 years for this to happen, sometimes 99 years. But the numbers are arbitrary. Becoming ‘old’ is the key.

In the West, we worry about diabolical creatures trying to get into our homes. From vampires to zombies, much of the drama in Halloween-worthy stories draws its power from that anxiety. Did we lock the doors? Secure the windows? What is that howling sound coming from outside…?

With tsukumogami, it’s much, much worse: the monsters are already in your house. Among the objects most likely to become tsukumogami are futons and tea-kettles, sandals and umbrellas – even musical instruments.

And as with any great story, belief or superstition – call it what you like – there is a sense of superhuman justice relentlessly at work. With tsukumogami, it comes in the form of a question: have you treated your futon or your tea-kettle well?

If you have, then when it comes alive it will – with luck – treat you well in return. Tsukumogami of this kind, folklore says, tend to be a little bored, melancholy and attention-seeking. Tedious to have around, no doubt, but not dangerous.

The same cannot be said for tsukumogami formed from objects that have been mistreated for some or all of those 99 or 100 long years. Did you fail to keep your sandals clean? Did your feet often stink? Well imagine how angry they’re going to be!

If you’re lucky, tsukumogami might express their resentment by breaking out of your home and disappearing off down the road. If you’re unlucky, they may turn on you and attack you. Grudge is such a powerful part of the Japanese imagination, seen elsewhere in tales of human beings – often women – wronged in life and becoming vengeful spirits in death.

The intended moral message is clear. Treat your possessions well. Be grateful – not just by feeling vaguely fortunate that you have them, but by actually showing gratitude towards them. To imagine your pots and pans as objects with the potential for consciousness might inspire you to treat them in a very different way.

Of course, the paying of such courtesies towards any and all inanimate objects has rarely been realistic for people. The alternative is called susuharai: a cleaning of the home that once included polishing treasured objects while getting rid of others before they were old enough to become tsukumogami. In some cases, people would take the additional precautionary step of carrying an old object to a shrine, as a form of sacred recycling.

Where does all this come from? There are origins of a sort in Shintō and Buddhism. According to Shintō, the world is full of kami (deities), particularly in the case of striking features of the natural environment: a great mountain, waterfall or stretch of woodland. Film fans will have encountered this in Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke.

From Buddhism, meanwhile, comes the idea that people, creatures and objects are all expressions of the Buddha’s ultimate truth. We all arise and disappear again in relationships of interdependence. We all possess the ‘Buddha-nature’: the potential for enlightenment.

All this came together in medieval Japan to produce the idea of tsukumogami. It seems to have been understood quite literally at first, but many of the images that we have of beings like kasa-obake (‘umbrella-monster’) date to the early modern period. People, perhaps, were more willing to create and purchase pictures of things that no longer scared them. Fear had turned into fascination, and the result was artists like Toriyama Sekien producing images of threadbare futons creeping across the floor and homeware banding together to create the martial body of a fearsome ‘Crockery General.’

Tsukumogami have even made it into the age of cinema and television. They’re everywhere in Pokémon. And fans of Spirited Away will have encountered walking buckets and scrubbing brushes – drawing on the old idea that tsukumogami dance or labour at night. The film features soot sprites, too, and a walking lantern that guides Chihiro across a bridge.

The one type of household object that us moderns don’t, thankfully, have to worry about is our gadgets. No matter how many times your child drops your iPhone into a toilet, it’s not going to spring into consciousness one night and try to smother you with a pillow. It is said that there is something about the electrical properties of these objects that interferes with the process of becoming a kami. Phew.

That doesn’t mean that tsukumogami have entirely gone away. While it’s hard to discern useful life lessons in the tide of orange and black plastic that is our own Halloween, tsukumogami have contributed to a cultural value in Japan that is still very much alive today: mottainai. It refers to a sense of waste, tinged with guilt or shame, over leaving food on your plate or throwing something away for which a use might somehow have been found.

None of this, of course, has prevented Japan from being one of the most consumerist societies on earth. Nevertheless, a sense persists there that the world doesn’t divide neatly into humans, animals and ‘the rest’. Put that alongside the wonders of Obon and you have a culture – on a good day, at least – where even amid throngs of tipsy cosplayers there lingers a sense of the genuine strangeness of life.