Does Western culture have anything like the tsukumogami? If it

>>52215649
Since OP is a fag, i'll explain for him

Tsukumogami is the japanese belief that any object, item, or thing that reaches over 100 years of age becomes self aware, effectively gaining it's own 'spirit'. This is why they have reverence for exceptionally old ancestral things like trees, swords, shrines, combs, dildos, etc.

The idea is that by using a thing regularly for a very long time, it becomes imbued with a sort of life - the anthrophomorphization we tend to project onto familiar objects becomes real.

You do see this in the west but in very particular or peculiar ways, most notably the naval tradition. The Japs actually made a videogame about this, it's very popular, it's also shit and full of moegarbage because it turns WW2 battleships into cute girls.

I guess you're counting out statues/golems.

There are some instances. Orpheus was said to this to rocks and inamiate objects and there was the belief that some objects under a full moonlight became alive, in some places.

This of course happened in fairytales, and sometimes in literature (I think Maupassant did a very chilly tale about that, actually).

I don't think there ever existed something "canonized" as tsukumogami were (at least in their graphical depictions) tough.

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>>52215713
I assumed everyone is a weeaboo or folklore nerd. Shame on my family.

>>52215961
Safe enough assumption when everybody is adjacent to Google.

>>52215649
There are already animated objects, just refluff them.

If you're looking for real-world equivalency then just look at objects that have been considered haunted/possessed or linked to more tribal spirits, similar idea without the arbitrary anniversary to cause the spirit possession.

>>52215649
The closest thing I can think of is that sense of companionship an old hand might attribute to the tools of their trade, or how someone might feel like a house or tree they've grown up beside is watching over them.

To answer your question, yes, the West has these.

However, they have been flavored by religion.

Instead of sentient things being worthwhile in their own right, it was more important to understand the motivation behind sentient things.

For instance, animated objects could be the domain of a poltergiest. Burning bushes could the the mortal agent of a god. Living statues could be the protectors of a community, after being imbued with Kaballistic magic. A bone of a long dead saint could be said to cure diseases. The shroud of Turin cures the wounded. A shard of the True Cross does miracles. Etc.

In these cases, the personification was either stripped out (because idolatry) or emphasized to be the work of a deity, either directly, or through a proxy. In Eastern mythos, they are more likely to be an independent thing.

Also, think of the toys of small children.

Stuffed animals are simply plush critters, made of cloth. But as a child, I had conversations with them. They had names, and personalities, and histories, and ideas, and jokes. They were personified. This is squelched and socially discouraged as an adult, but to children, they very much personify objects, and it's *real* enough to them, for a time.

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Mainly ships. Sometimes planes, though those are more reflections of their pilots. Mainly ships, though. Take the USS Salt Lake City, for example.

>This feature article appeared May 17th, 1948 in the Milwaukee Journal. It was illustrated with a picture of the cruiser and two cartoons reproduced from the ship's history. Contributed to the USS SLC Website by SLC Veteran, James O'Hara

>"They're taking the old Swayback Maru out and sinking her. And that's more than the Japs could ever do! The news of her fate was in the newspapers a week or so ago. The item said:

>Vallejo, CA. --- AP --- The heavy cruiser Salt Lake City, radioactive from her role in the Bikini Atomic Bomb Test, will be sunk this month, according to officials of the Mare Island Navy Yard.

>This news item, to anyone who ever knew the old girl, is grossly inadequate. The Salt Lake City was not the best ship in the world. She was a cantankerous, rough riding, flea bitten, left handed old rust pot, with a past, but no future.

>Any of the 1,100 men aboard would have told you that. But they might have poked you in the nose if you agreed. She looked like something the cat dragged in. She was as glamorous as a middling beautiful warthog. She was as luxurious as a garbage truck. Public acclaim passed her by. But she could fight, brother, she could fight.

>Just to put the thing in focus, here's what she did:

>She fired the first American shells to land on Jap held soil. In one battle, she accounted for two Jap heavy cruisers, a light cruiser, a destroyer and an auxiliary vessel. She got the destroyer in a single salvo. She fought in the longest naval duel ever staged by American ships and in standing off twice her own weight, may have saved the invasion of Attu.

>She engaged in 91 days of bombardment in a period of 101 days, probably a world record. And she was, without doubt, the only modern ship whose steering wheel fell off twice in battle."

>1/?

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>>52217960
>By way of variety it raided Chichi Jima, 350 miles from Tokyo Bay, the closest that American surface vessels without air cover had been to the mainland of Japan.

>When the Wheel Fell Off

>On one of those raids the steering wheel, loosened by the jar of the firing, fell off. The helmsman held it up in his two hands. And he turned to the captain with deference.

>"Sir," he said, "what do I do with this now?"

>"Switch steering to auxiliary steering aft," ordered the sweating Captain.

>The crew fell into a certain nonchalance about combat. At Saipan the officer of the deck accepted a line from a tanker and started fueling while an air attack was going on at an island two miles away.

>During one bombardment some genius of the commissary discovered caviar left over from a gala in San Francisco a year before. Officers off duty munched it in the wardroom while the guns roared.

>Off Okinawa, Poncho Miller, the boss of the lookouts, reported calmly, "Jap Betty (a bombing plane) is directly overhead."

>"Signal it to keep going," was the reply.

>For the Swayback was at Okinawa and she was in on the fall of Iwo Jima too. She stayed 25 days at Iwo, bombarding continuously, as long as any major bombardment ship. And 10 days later --- six of them had been spent in traveling --- she was at Okinawa.

>She stayed there 66 days. Her task was not nearly as dangerous as that of the heroic little vessels who went on radar patrol up Amami O Shima way. But it was uninterrupted drudgery, heightened by a remark by the admiral.

>He was down to one ship then, for the Chester had been in a collision off Iwo Jima and the Japs had beaten up the Pensacola badly. The high brass at Okinawa had a plan for keeping the Jap suicide boats bottled up at night in Naha Harbor.

>"I can do it better," said the admiral, in effect.

>"You go do it" said the high brass.

2/?

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>>52217977
>To a man who came aboard later, it was odd to think that the Salt Lake City had once been a bulwark against the rising tide of Japan. That tide was receding. America had put out newer, sleeker ships and the Swayback --- now 14 years old --- was fast becoming antediluvian. Her towering tripod foremast had become outmoded. At the end of the war, it was the only one on any active cruiser in the fleet.

>Somewhere, she had picked up a perpetual list, which gave her the look of a tipsy dowager. People who viewed her in shocked awe for the first time confessed later they expected her to hiccup.

>She picked up tons of water. Her gear was old, her look shopworn. In the "passion pit" where ensigns lived their hodgepodge lives, there was whispered doubt as to whether her watertight doors were really watertight. The crew said that a seaman chipping paint had driven his hammer right through one rested outside plate. And the legend started that the Swayback kept afloat only because the cockroaches formed a ring around her hull and held hands.

>One new engineer came aboard, fresh from the States and full of "book-learning". It took seven cups of the lethal wardroom coffee to restore him to speech after his first inspection trip.

>"My God," he said. But the Swayback made her 30 knots in the second battle of the Philippines.

>Her duty at that time was mostly of the type known as detached. With her fellow cruisers, the Chester and the Pensacola, almost equally old, and a handful of destroyers, she prowled the waters north of Saipan. To its unimpressed denizens, the task force was known as the "junkyard flotilla" and the quip was that it was kept away from the newer ships of the fleet because sight of it would ruin their morale. The admiral in command was known as "the mad mariner of the Mariners."

>3/?

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>>52217991
>So the routine was bombard by day and bombard by night and all hands to battle stations, there's a Jap air attack coming in. Men worked until their eyes and their brains became exhausted. And the only fun aboard was the trick that was being played on Alley Oop.

>Alley was a senior officer who, by force of personality, had won a following of fanatical dislike. Men caught their sleep those days when they could --- all but Alley Oop. There was a five inch gun just outside his cabin, and when he sneaked in for a short nap, the word was passed quietly and the men on that gun went to work in unholy glee.

>Now... the bark of a five inch gun 10 feet away is something no man can sleep through, unless that man be dead. It fetched Alley Oop bolt upright and swearing.

>There was rejoicing aboard the Swayback when the trick reached its climax and the unfortunate man fell asleep at breakfast, with his face in his scrambled eggs.

>At Iwo Jima and Okinawa, the Swayback fired 29,770 eight inch and five inch shells, in addition to the lighter stuff she tossed at Kamikazes.

>She went away at last with a single destroyer escort. The whiplash from the firing had so cracked the antenna of her air search radar that whole areas of sky could not be surveyed, the rifling on her five inch guns was so worn that the guns couldn't twist a star shell enough to set it off.

>4/5

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>>52218008
>A Jap plane spotted her off Formosa. Six could have sunk her, or maybe four, for her worn anti-aircraft's couldn't have hit the continent of North America. But nothing happened. The Swayback was a lucky ship.

>At Marcus Island, a Jap battery had got her range and straddled her seven times, one shell falling just short, the other screaming over. Spray from one shell splashed her main deck, but nothing touched her.

>Once at Iwo Jima she went fast aground. But the Japs failed to fire while she was helpless. Her closest call at Iwo was from the shell of an American battleship that missed the low part of the island and exploded so close to the Swayback that a fragment struck her above the bridge.

>Off Kerama Retto she went through a Jap minefield at night with an air raid going on. At Okinawa, Kamikazes twice took out the next ship in line and coastal batteries sand another, but they never scratched her. In the China sea she brushed a floating mine, but it was a dud.
>And on the peacetime voyage home the luck of the Swayback almost ran out. She lurched across the ocean in heavy seas in the wake of a typhoon. At the mouth of the Columbia River, within sight of the land she had helped defend, a freak wave smashed her and rolled her 47 degrees off horizontal. She escaped capsizing by a terrifyingly small margin --- just eight degrees.

>The Swayback was selected --- what else could you do with such junk? --- for the Bikini Atom Bomb Test.

>Nobody who had been aboard would have given you a Chinese dollar for her chances. But she rode the waves that the bomb set up the way a duck rides over a ripple.

>Now they are taking her out to sink her in the blue, clean water.

>Sea creatures will crawl over the deck. The waters will close over her and she'll be forgotten. But some of us will be sad at her going.

>5/6

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>>52218026
>Captain Recalls demise of USS SALT LAKE CITY

>"They pumped 50mm shells into her. Then they followed with rockets. Next came the bombers, first with 100 pound bombers, then with 500 pound bombers, finally 1,000 pound bombers.

>She still stood there, mauled but not beaten. Then the destroyers came and shelled her with their five-inch guns. She took it for two and a half hours."

>Capt. E. J. MacGregor studied the bell of the cruiser USS SALT LAKE CITY.

>It hangs in front of Utah naval reserve headquarters at Ft. Douglas. Capt. MacGregor is deputy chief for the Naval Reserve, 12th Naval District, San Francisco, here for a seminar with Utah Naval Reserve officers.

>But in 1948 he was at Bikini Atoll on the bridge of a ship watching calculated destruction. The USS Salt Lake City already a survivor of an atomic test blast, was now getting a "progressive" battering.

>But even after the destroyers had hurled hundreds of shells into her, she was still afloat.

>Capt. MacGregor had been a submariner. They called for a submarine. The under seas craft slid into position 1,000 yards away. It was like taking the challenger out of the ring in the 12th round and substituting a fresh fighter. The torpedo hammered home. Whoomph! The Salt Lake City heeled over and died.

>"Everybody walked off the bridge with tears in his eyes."

>6/6

So yes, I would say that we do.

Here's some ideas I had for European fantasy stuff inspired by them:

Staffers
>Wizard staves turned into creature's with one eye on the end of a long appendage
>Eyebeam spells
>"Talks" in Magi-babble

Horn goblin
>Basically a goblin head with two hollow horns and two stumpy legs
> Vomits ale, sneezes gunpowder, makes loud horn blasts
>He's having a good time

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>>52218038

>>52217960
>>52215649

The old battlewagons like Texas and Missouri will actually talk to you if you're listening right.

Or that could have been someone above deck, I dunno. All I know is I heard a woman's voice say "I gotta protect my boys" on both of those ships when no one else was visible.

>>52217991
>the legend started that the Swayback kept afloat only because the cockroaches formed a ring around her hull and held hands.
A hearty chuckles was had, I love this sort of stuff.

>>52215649
Pretty much every ancient culture had animism in one form or another. First one I thought of was the Roman "Lares"- household spirits that would inhabit a home and protect its inhabitants.