Old Japan had the chirizuka — a dust heap where sweepings and rubbish simply piled up. Toriyama Sekien looked at that pile and gave it a king. His name is Chirizuka-kaiō. Today's yokai books usually call him the ruler of every object a household gave up on.
What does it look like?
Sekien's print shows a red, oni-like demon. He is prying open a karabitsu, a large legged storage chest. There is no throne and no heap of junk in the picture. He looks fierce, the way oni usually look in prints of the time.
A king for things nobody wants
The idea Sekien is illustrating is the tsukumogami (付喪神), the belief that household tools left in use for around a hundred years can wake into a spirit — and, in one strand of the tradition, take revenge on the family that finally discards them. That story is told most fully in the Muromachi-period Tsukumogami-ki, in which tools thrown out during the year-end housecleaning grow furious at being abandoned after decades of loyal service, band together, and go on a rampage before eventually settling into a quieter, more Buddhist old age.
Sekien's Hyakki Tsurezure Bukuro (百器徒然袋, 1784), the fourth and final volume of his yokai print series, is built almost entirely around this idea — each page a different worn-out object given a spirit and a name. Chirizuka-kaiō is the volume's odd one out: not a specific tool that has come alive. Sekien's own caption calls him the chief of the yamamba, mountain hags formed from piled-up dust. That line borrows from the Noh play Yamamba, where clouds of clinging dust pile up into a mountain hag. Reading him as king of all the junk tools is a later idea. It spread in yokai books from the Heisei era (1989–2019) on.
Not folk memory, but a print artist's joke
Scholars generally treat most of the Hyakki Tsurezure Bukuro's entries as Sekien's own invention rather than yokai anyone in an Edo village actually told stories about around a fire. Chirizuka-kaiō is a clear case of that: there is no older tale of a rubbish-heap king waiting to be discovered behind the print. Sekien took a common word — the dust heap — and a line from a Noh play, and fused them into a single figure. It is less village legend than an artist's caption made visible.
Where it comes from
The name looks plain at first: chirizuka is simply the old word for a rubbish mound, and kaiō, "mysterious king," is the title Sekien gives its unlikely ruler. Read together, the four characters seem to say "king of the junk pile." But the word has a literary source too. Tsurezuregusa, section 72, says some things are fine in large numbers. Its examples include "the dust in a dust heap." Many entries in Sekien's book borrow lines from Tsurezuregusa. Another entry, fuguruma-yōhi, comes from the very same sentence.
See the original print
Toriyama Sekien drew Chirizuka-kaio in Hyakki Tsurezure Bukuro (1784). This book has that picture, with its caption in English.
- Japandemonium Illustrated: The Yokai Encyclopedias of Toriyama Sekien →trans. Hiroko Yoda & Matt AltThe complete Edo-period bestiaries that so many of these entries trace back to, in full English translation.
- The Book of Yokai →Michael Dylan FosterThe most readable scholarly introduction to yokai — where they come from, what they mean, and the major creatures.
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Chirizuka-kaiō today
Chirizuka-kaiō never picked up a second life the way kappa or tanuki did — there is no mascot, no snack named after him. He survives almost entirely in reprints and translations of the Hyakki Tsurezure Bukuro and in yokai reference works that catalogue Sekien's four print series entry by entry. What keeps him from being a total footnote is how legible the joke still is: anyone who has ever hesitated over a broken umbrella before finally putting it out with the trash has, for a moment, stood in Chirizuka-kaiō's kingdom.
