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bleachbleachbleach · 5 months

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All right B3 I gotta know...what concept of time do Shinigami use? How do they mark or measure the hours of the day? What kind of clocks or time-telling devices do they use? Analog or sundials?

“There are not just two times,” notes the physicist Carlo Rovelli in The Order of Time. “Times are legion: a different one for every point in space.” What we think of the present, he writes, “does not extend throughout the universe.” Rather, “it is like a bubble around us.” The “well-defined now,” as he calls it, “is an illusion.”

— “The Science of the Perfect Second,” by Tom Vanderbilt in Harper’s Magazine (April 2023).

Where time is concerned, I think we have enough canon evidence to say that the standard the Gotei has chosen is “whatever best coincides with the living world,” a 24-hour day with hours and minutes and seconds.

We see this mostly in the Soul Society arc, where Rukia’s execution is timed to the hour, and Hinamori has a whole alarm clock:

This isn’t to say there aren’t other forms of time in play as well (earlier Rukia tries to direct Chad toward the “hour of the tiger,” which no one else has ever mentioned as far as I know—maybe this is Kuchiki time, maybe this is Inuzuri time). I kind of feel like Soul Society may have embraced the multiplicity of different available measurement systems even harder than we have. Like, we have the age-old battle between Imperial and metric, and countless additional Indigenous, religious, etc. systems of measure. They have madness.

At the same time, I can think of some reasons this wouldn’t be true: Their world—at least, a world they have institutional memory of—is smaller than ours, in that there were fewer generations across which things might change, and fewer population loci (or rather, a singular locus, that being the Seireitei). There is also, of course, the near-infinite variations within Rukongai—but where shinigami are concerned, it’s the Seireitei and the Seireitei. Anyone shinigami happens to be familiar with X, Y, or Z system of Rukongai measurement is still going to know what the Seiretei uses; and what the Seireitei uses is probably 1) whatever the nobles continue to assert, combined with 2) whatever the 12th is begging people to use instead (Gotei-specific standard being the latter).

Which brings us back to the Gotei usage of mainstream Living World time.

The very interesting follow-up questions, of course, are:

Why?

To what end?

Practical Reasons

Despite the fact that this conception of time is even more removed from that which it is derived than it already is for us, there are practical reasons for its usage: Shinigami understand their purpose to be mediating the balance of souls across dimensions, which means their work directly concerns the Living World. For the sake of the dangai and keeping the number of shinigami that vanish in it to a minimum, standardizing time as much as possible seems important. It gives the 12th something to work with—some worldview that can unify the worlds a little bit and make all of this interdimensional travel and tracking possible! (See the links at the end of this post for further discussion!)

Also, without standardizing time across dimensions how are you supposed to make it to your Worm TV Zoom meeting on time? (Sidebar: I’ve previously hypothesized that the pomp and circumstance of the Worm TV was about network security but let’s be real, it’s probably also how you have a conversation in [nearly] real-time across dimensions. I would not be surprised if there was a wicked delay on denreishinki messages/data. See: The Great Gentei Kaijou Debacle of 2001.

Ideological Potentials

What follows are five ideas I think are interesting potential outgrowths of the discussion on Soul Society's use of mainstream Living World time:

1. Having chosen Living World time as the standard doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the most relevant concept of time for vast swathes of non-dangai/shinigami life in Soul Society.

We get “shinigami aging makes no sense” discourse all the time, but like, there’s at least two ways of looking at that: Either shinigami aging doesn’t work with (this concept of) time, or it’s this concept of time does not work for them. "Time" not working/not applying isn’t unique to shinigami, and we have plenty of Living World examples of this: Indigenous time, crip time, Island time, &c.

Functionally relevant or not, though, I think Living time holds additional, deep-seated ideological meaning for shinigami, too.

2. The choice of Living World time as Soul Society’s standard plays an active role in making and defining the relationship between shinigami and the living.

At a basic level, the purview of shinigami is death, and “life” may be described as being in time, where “death” is being out of it. This is complicated by any number of things—namely, there being an afterlife and some version of time still operating there, lol, but also the notion that being in time the “correct” way makes you more alive (see: crip time), or the notion that life and death are dualistic opposites (religiously and culturally, not a universal truth). It's of course further complicated by the fact that even if it's not the most relevant measure of time in Soul Society, time does in fact (now) exist there. Soul Society is not out of time so much as it is in time in very strange ways that stretch the definition of what that's supposed to mean.

3. The Living World is a moving target, as far as understanding it goes.

It’s constantly changing, and even if a soul is a soul is a soul, I feel like there’s no way the relationship between shinigami and the Living World has enjoyed the same level of elemental stability. Even taking only the 20th century into account, the cultural significance of shinigami and other such folklore in Japan has had massive swings. Who’s to say the Meiji Restoration and “modernization” didn’t make shinigami work way harder? Who’s to say the re-emergence of said folklore post-WWII and through the mid-20th century didn’t similarly impact what it meant to be a shinigami, how hard it was to do your job, and how much job you had to do? (Is reishi even thinner when fewer humans believe it might exist? Is it thicker under torii gates, or in spaces of ritual?)

Going off of that:

4. If ways of knowing can impact ways of being with respect to the relationship between shinigami and the Living World, perhaps Soul Society itself feels those impacts even more strongly.

The nature of zanpakutou is all about manifesting the inner into the outer world, and given that Soul Society is reishi all the way down, maybe some version of that holds true for Soul Society as a whole: It has seasons and solar days and all of these things, in these particular ways, not just because it exists in the echo of the Living World but also because bringing this concept of time to Soul Society has effected concrete (inasmuch as anything reishi is “concrete”) change in Soul Society. Maybe, given enough time, shinigami could wake up one day and Soul Society WOULD have a molten core and a real moon.

Or maybe there are too many additional forces working against any kind of progressive trajectory (see: Soul Society anachronisms, see: the incredible stretchiness of space-time in Rukongai/traveling across Rukongai [yes I’m thinking about Renji in the Bount arc, I am never not thinking about Renji in the Bount Arc]).

The relationship between Soul Society and the Living World, in addition to being defined in terms of life and death, could also be defined in terms of the material and the spiritual. Perhaps time becomes a critical link point between the two. In the Living World, units of measurement broadly writ have gradually lost their material referents; instead of measuring every kilogram against a literal kilogram object, The Kilogram, kept in a French vault, they are now measured in terms of universal constants, or math. But time has never been material, and maybe that makes it ideologically special for Soul Society and the Living World—a point of relation, an opportunity.

5. Living World philosopher Henri Bergson suggests that the spirit is anchored in the past and the body in the present, and time is the union of the spirit and the body.

Basically, he theorizes that pure memory is within the purview of the spiritual, and in order to react with consciousness you need to perceive something and let memory impress itself on what it means to you--it requires relation with the past. Spiritual beings and the past aren't exactly the same thing in Soul Society, but the way time and memory work and the way image functions in Edo-looking Soul Society roll together in cool ways here.

And perhaps time, then, becomes a way of laying claim to the shinigami’s prime directive: To be shepherds of souls, stewards of the balance between realms. If time, and by extension, the relationship between shinigami and the living, can be defined with *increasing specificity*, then perhaps in some courts this might prove the prime directive, prove the legitimacy of the shinigami project--that is, their relationship to the Living World and what it is they think their job is.

Then time becomes both a means of relation and intimacy between these words and their denizens, and also a measure of control/claim that is as loving (six hearts beating as one) as it is violent (thousand-year blood wars).

Further Food for Thought:

-> “In Search of Lost Time,” by Tom Vanderbilt in Harper’s Magazine (2023), which inspired a lot of my thinking here and offers an absolutely beautiful rumination on time, systems of measurement and their dematerialization, and different elemental clocks. I’ve read this three separate times this year because I liked it that much!

-> “The Tyranny of Time,” by Joe Zadeh in Noēma (2021), which is also about the standarization of time and the ways our minds and bodies might be out of sync with this standard; and is also about the historical muddiness of time and timezones and time in scatters of English villages.

-> More on the "Hour of the Tiger" thing:

-> More about different conceptions/measurement systems of time, and its wimeyness in historical Japan and also Soul Society (see "info" tab for our response tags):

-> Thinking about time at an existential timescale (primordial ooze shinigami):

-> Followed up by more about Universal Time and the Dangai:

#a forewarning that this post is very long #it is stream of consciousness but it also took 9 billion years to re-find the links at the bottom so please enjoy them!#polynya i swear you have a post where renji is very frankly discussing the fact that winter hours themselves are a different length than #spring hours and i'm pretty sure he's talking to byakuya but i cannot find it and now i feel spiritually bereft without it #bleach headcanons #shinigamiology #no brain just bleach #asks #bleach #i'll reiterate our standing invitation to all tumblr anons #please make a blog! join the fandom! we want to engage in dialogic communications with you and also be friends!#we want to hear your soul society time headcanons!

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