#in fairness all the shrines and temples tend to be considered fairly secularly in Japan to begin with

[bleachbleachbleach]

(and I am so mad that I had to re-save that with a big rectangle behind it so Tumblr would not stretch it to a ridiculous size)

I definitely agree that there is a whole project team in 12th dedicated entirely to timekeeping. And OMG I love the idea that the ability to track Hollows coming out of different realms is more simple or more difficult; amazing.

YES TO SLOW TIME RUKONGAI (or even more specifically, slower and slower time Rukongai I love it.) To add, my theory about space in Rukongai is that it’s not even strictly linear (because given that it’s an afterlife why would it be linear). In the sense that like, if you expect it to be linear, then it more or less is, but if you’re not thinking about it enough then time gets all bendy and Weird Stuff can happen. (This may also be why the souls living in x y or z district tend not to be particularly itinerant.) And also there are just spots that fold in on one another and bridge disparate locations and being able to use this to your advantage is a skillset one can have if, for instance, one needs to beat it through 79 districts of Rukongai in during a filler arc.

I don't think modrn day Japan celebrates LNY but do you think soul society still does? It would make sense since half the ppl are old as balls and predate when japan stopped celebrating

恭禧發財! Thank you for this ask! <3333 I, uh. I answered it but I got distracted by calendars and Y2K and primordial ooze, so I’m just going to excerpt the 4th paragraph, since that’s the actually relevant Lunar New Years part! Clearly still in my Soi Fon era rn.

In the New Years episodes, Rukia et al suggest that shinigami New Years is very much an intentional borrow from the living realm, and considered as such. It’s also a fairly new one. If they’re so hyped about borrowing this new years, I imagine they probably also borrowed prior ones, and that during the relevant period, Lunar New Year got celebrated. But given their present zest for the Gregorian calendar—and the general lack of institutional memory around TBTP, which as far as shinigami lifespans go was not that long ago, and only like 30 years after the calendar switch—I feel like they probably nope’d right out of Lunar New Year and plum forgot about it. Or maybe it’s still a Soi Fon family tradition. Maybe Soi Fon doesn’t like cats because of Yoruichi—Yoruichi’s cat transformation is just one more reason for Soi Fon to like Yoruichi. She grew up on animal zodiac stories!

The rest is below the cut for posterity!

The calendar in Soul Society is so interesting to me, because like… I’m going to start somewhere calendar-adjacent, but I guess one day several hundred years ago Yamamoto decided that architecture/clothing had peaked and he decreed they were just going to stay in their Edo vibes from then on—even though like, clearly even the "modern" Soul Society/Seireitei predates Edo by quite a bit, so it must all have looked very different for most of its history, unless the shinigami actually invented this styling independently. It also wasn’t a hard stop, because some places have Western furniture and they print a reasonably contemporary-looking magazine and the 2nd has heated floors. (BUT THERE’S NO CAKE.)

They seem incredibly committed to the Gregorian calendar, and making sure their calendar syncs with the Living World’s calendar—or at least, any time stuff gets skewy in the dangai, someone pitches a fit. And I get why they would feel like that was important, wanting to keep track of their deployed units and all. Lolllll, man, you know how most of the reports are handwritten? I bet it’s only half out of tradition and the other half is out of a fear that they will Y2K themselves into oblivion by accident; and they should be rightly concerned, because that seems like something they would do. (The 12th has all those mainframes because they do not share this fear.) This is probably also why denreishiki (or the model that Rukia got) can print things. Every time Hitsugaya texts a report there’s someone on the other end with a tiny printer gluing receipt tape into a scrapbook. Or maybe someone transcribing them by hand because denreishinki print with non-archival ink.

But this is getting away from me. I guess what I’m curious about is at what point shinigami began fashioning themselves after cultures in the living world. Did they pre-exist humans (in a different form), evolve with them, or did the notions of deity, death, and afterlife need to develop first? Do they have their own independently developed cultural forms or is it all/does it all have to be a riff off the world of the living? Is this something they have ever had (prior to Edo? prior to modern Soul Society?) Is the whole "we capture a Hollow in the realm of the living and then drag it back to Soul Society for part of a ritual that takes place 12 years after the death of a captain" thing a shinigami invention, or does that also have roots in older human practices (iomante?)?

In the New Years episodes, Rukia et al suggest that shinigami New Years is very much an intentional borrow from the living realm, and considered as such. It’s also a fairly new one. ("Fairly" here could mean anything from 150 to 15 years I guess, lol.) If they’re so hyped about borrowing this new years, I imagine they probably also borrowed prior ones, and that during the relevant period, Lunar New Year got celebrated. But given their present zest for the Gregorian calendar—and the general lack of institutional memory around TBTP, which as far as shinigami lifespans go was not that long ago, and only like 30 years after the calendar switch—I feel like they probably nope’d right out of Lunar New Year and plum forgot about it. Or maybe it’s still a Soi Fon family tradition. Maybe Soi Fon doesn’t like cats because of Yoruichi—Yoruichi’s cat transformation is just one more reason for Soi Fon to like Yoruichi. She grew up on animal zodiac stories!

Honestly, I’m just impressed that the old guard shinigami have managed to adapt to what was probably a good many calendars, one after the other and many simultaneous. Do you think that’s part of why Ukitake is so zeroed in on everyone’s birthdays? I mean, besides being a nice guy and wanting the Youth to feel some sense of celebration in the passage of time while it still holds meaning in their hearts lol. They’re also handy mnemonics! Because Ukitake would not give a shit about this newfangled calendar they’re using now, were it not for its utility in tracking the birthdays of all his lovely coworkers.

I think of Soul Society of being fairly sclerotic, but it’s super interesting the ways that this is paired with these punctuations of modernization fever? Or like, a desire to bring as much of the living realm into theirs as they can, even as these efforts are uneven and sometimes a bit odd. I think it goes back to this question of whether their realm predates humans on Earth (or in Japan), has always been concomitant, or proceeds from a human ability to conceive of an afterlife. I could honestly vibe with any of these.

Pre-dating humans on earth would be fun because you could lean into shinigami monstrosity and imagine how completely different they would have been without the blueprint of a human form, and before asauchi were even a glimmer in Nimaiya’s eye. That would also suggest that shinigami would have had to adopt this idea of being balancers and having anything to do with human souls, rather than being teleologically destined for this purpose.

Being twinned to the human realm would be fun because it plays up the notion of Soul Society as reflection.

And the third option of being tied not to human corporeality as distinct from the primordial ooze, but to a particular kind of human consciousness—well, that starts getting very esoteric (she says, as though the rest of this wasn't).

Anyway, the modernization fever is interesting re: these potential origin stories because of the way it indexes how important the living realm is to Soul Society—it’s perceived as some kind of backwater frontier, but also the location of the sublime.

** Please note that I’m sure there’s some kind of Soul King-related origin story upon which the entire plot of Bleach rests, but my brain actively flouts this knowledge. What is a Soul King, I don’t caaaare.